Odysseus Bound
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: Dumbledore tells Harry, when they meet in King's Cross, that he cannot return alive to his own world, because there is supposed to be no magic capable of resurrecting the dead. Harry can take a train from King's Cross into other worlds. Somewhere in those seas of revolution, fear, horror, and glory, he may have a chance at finding a home. Multiple pairings.
1. Out From Troy

**Title: **Odysseus Bound  
**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.  
**Rating: **R  
**Warnings: **Violence, torture, angst, AUs of various kinds, some very OOC and arguably bashing versions of various characters. Other warnings will vary by chapter; I'll announce it in the header for that chapter if it's something unusual.  
**Pairings: **This story, because of the way it works, will feature lots of pairings, both background and main (pairings for Harry). They're likely to be both slash and het, and may include Harry/Draco, Harry/Snape, Harry/Hermione, perhaps some threesomes, and others, as well as sections of the story that are pure gen.  
**Summary: **Dumbledore tells Harry, when they meet in King's Cross, that he cannot return alive to his own world, as there is supposed to be no magic capable of resurrecting the dead. Harry does, however, have the chance to take the trains from King's Cross to other worlds, always appearing near what would be the site of Platform 9 3/4 in that world. And perhaps, somewhere out in the seas of revolution, intrigue, horror, romance, and glory he'll voyage, he has the chance of finding a home.  
**Author's Notes: **This is going to be a very irregularly updated story, basically whenever I finish a new chapter. I expect the chapters (barring this first one) to be very long. Harry, however, will be the only POV character, and he will explore only versions of the Harry Potter world. I don't have any idea yet how many chapters it will be. If this sounds like something you can live with, come right in.

**Odysseus Bound**

_Chapter One-Out From Troy_

"So I can go back and be alive? Voldemort didn't really kill me?" Harry's head was spinning as he stared at the little baby version of Voldemort writhing on the floor of King's Cross, still squealing and waving badly-developed limbs.

Dumbledore's silence made him look up. The twinkle had dimmed in those blue eyes, and Harry swallowed. "Or am I dead?" he whispered.

Dumbledore sighed. "You are not dead," he said, looking like he had the night he explained the prophecy to Harry. "But you cannot be alive in our world."

Harry stood there and thought about Ron and Hermione and Hagrid and Neville and Ginny and Molly and all the rest of them who would be appalled if he was dead, who needed him. He thought about Snape and how he would have died in vain if Harry died. Or was it in vain? He had given Harry the memories of how he knew Harry was being raised and trained as a sacrifice, after all, and it seemed he had expected to die in the war. Maybe this was just the way he'd thought things would work out.

Harry felt his eyes twitching and blurring. But he was thinking of the shades of his parents and Sirius and Remus that had accompanied him on his walk through the Forest. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, to be with them.

Then he shook his head, hard. Dumbledore had said he was alive. He focused on Dumbledore again, trying to see him clearly, both the man who had protected him and the man who had known all along what the prophecy probably implied, and demanded, "Why not?"

"Because no magic exists that can bring back the dead," Dumbledore said quietly. "It is impossible. Either you must be a shade of the kind the Resurrection Stone conjures, not truly there and liable to fading and drawing the one who calls you back into the shadows with you, or you must be an Inferius and under the control of another wizard."

"There's no way to escape?" Harry's lips were dry. "I mean, I thought maybe it was the Horcrux in me that died, and I could come back..."

Dumbledore's smile was so sad that Harry thought he would prefer to turn away and look at the bloody Horcrux on the floor. "This is a magical rule," Dumbledore said. "The world you left has no place for one who has died and come back. And do you not remember the end of the story of the Deathly Hallows, Harry? There is no way to escape death. You may evade it for a time, but the wisest of the Peverell Brothers yielded to it at last."

Harry squeezed his eyes shut and nodded. "So I have to choose to die?"

"_Your _world has no place for someone who has escaped death."

Harry looked up. "But another world might?" he asked, when Dumbledore simply stood watching him and waiting for him to speak.

Dumbledore twinkled at him. "Exactly, my dear boy! There are thousands of other worlds out there, worlds that are like ours but where someone made a different decision. Perhaps your mother did not succeed in protecting you on the night that Voldemort tried to kill you. Perhaps he decided to go after Neville instead. Perhaps Tom died as a child..." Dumbledore's voice trailed off, and he sighed again.

"But not every world will permit you entrance," he added, before Harry could ask what he was thinking about. "Only worlds with a gap for you."

"A gap for me?" Harry echoed.

Dumbledore nodded. "If there is already a version of yourself in that world, Harry, a version that is recognizably you despite the differences between the worlds, there is no _place _for you there. It is hard to explain, but-magic is only so flexible. It is the same reason that you cannot return to your world. The magic will not stretch to accommodate you. It can only allow you even into another dimension if the Harry Potter in that place never existed, or died, or is so fundamentally different that you would be adding a new person to the world, not a replica of one that exists."

Harry placed a hand to his whirling head. "Can I at least _try _going back to my world?" he asked abruptly. It wasn't that he distrusted Dumbledore, not really, but he didn't understand the magical theory he was talking about, either, not the way Hermione would have. So he thought a demonstration was the best way to convince himself.

Dumbledore nodded.

Harry looked around. The far end of King's Cross Station was seething with a lot more mist than the one Dumbledore had come out of. So he turned and walked that way, even though it brought him closer to the slick, screaming fetus that had been the Horcrux.

He'd walked about six meters when the air began to tighten and solidify around him. Harry reached out. It was like he was following a tunnel that had inexplicably become smaller, and no matter how he pushed, the air didn't yield any more than stone would have.

But it hadn't _closed _yet. Harry slogged forwards, trying to ignore the bright white glare of the light here, and the wails of the Horcrux behind him, and the sensation that Dumbledore's eyes were watching his naked arse. He tried to think of nothing but the sensations around him, the narrowing of perfectly invisible walls.

It didn't matter. The walls were _there_, as solid as his Invisibility Cloak. Harry pushed and pushed and pushed, and still they crowded in, until he knew he was in danger of getting stuck; he could feel the pressure on his shoulders and binding around his waist. With a growl, he stepped back and stared ahead. Now he thought he could see a distant door, heavy and blue, bolted with white, but he couldn't reach it.

"That is the door back to your world," Dumbledore whispered. "I am so sorry, my dear boy."

"Is there a spell that could break the way open?" Harry asked, not turning to face Dumbledore yet. He didn't blame him for this-how could he, when Dumbledore was dead?-but he had to focus, or he might lose the chance. "Some way that I could go back like a ghost?"

"If you wish to die, then you can," Dumbledore said gently. "You only need remain here until your body and spirit both weaken, and then your spirit will be able to break free and travel."

Harry clenched his hands. He wanted to say that was preferable, with one part of him, the part that had dreamed about living in peace with Ron and Hermione and making a family with Ginny. He wanted to die rather than go to a different world, or live without his friends. At least, if he was a ghost, he could still see them.

But the rest of him...

He had walked to his death, but he had thought that would be _death, _not a choice between worlds. He shook his head and turned back to face Dumbledore. "Do you think that I'm really going to find a world where I fit?"

Dumbledore examined him carefully, more gently than Harry thought he ever had when they were both alive. Then Dumbledore whispered, "Yes, I believe so. There is a home out there for everyone, a way of forgiving every mistake. I have to believe that."

Noting the wistful look on Dumbledore's face, Harry waited a little before he said, "But how likely is it that I can find it?"

Dumbledore shook his head. "I don't know," he admitted quietly. "It could be years; it could be months. Perhaps you might find a world that does not fit you _perfectly _but fits you, and live there for a while."

Harry folded his arms and shivered. "I could be wandering forever," he muttered. "Maybe I'll never find a place that fits me."

"That is, alas, true," Dumbledore said. He opened his mouth as though to say something else, maybe to reassure Harry that he hadn't condemned him to this on purpose, and then shut it again and sighed.

"I don't understand," Harry said. His voice cracked, which he hated. He took a few seconds before he started talking again, and to his relief, his voice was firmer when he did that. "Why did this happen to me?"

Dumbledore bowed his head. "I thought you would either die," he whispered, "or return from the dead separated from the Horcrux, never having gone through death itself. Then you would still be able to take your place in your world because you would be _alive_. But this..." He waved his hand around the misty King's Cross Station. "This counts as a Gate of Death. You have changed," he added, running his eyes over Harry. "Your aura has. Your magical core has. You have passed through the Gates of Death, and cannot simply walk back. It seems the Horcrux was more deeply embedded in your soul than I knew. The Killing Curse slew it, but it also partially slew you."

"_Partially_," Harry said flatly.

"It pushed you through the Gates." Dumbledore stretched out a hand to him. "I would do anything to change it back, Harry."

Harry bit his lip savagely and turned his back on the misty gate to his own world, which it seemed that he wasn't going to be able to use. He looked ahead into the mist on the other side of the station, and heard a low, thrumming sound coming from it. He blinked.

"What's that?"

"Your means of transportation, if you choose to take it," Dumbledore said, and turned around himself to face the mist expectantly.

The train purred straight up to Harry, as though it was following a lead. It was smaller than the Hogwarts Express, sleek and silver, the color of the mist. Harry reached out and put a hand on the side of it, and flinched a little. The metal seemed to be covered in alternating strips of intense heat and intense cold.

"Why is it like that?" he whispered without taking his eyes from the train.

"Because it, too, has come through the Gates of Death," Dumbledore said. His voice was distant, even though when Harry glanced towards him, he was right there. "It bears the cold of what lies beyond and the warmth of mortality."

Harry looked back at the train. A door swung open in the side as he watched, a sleek ramp that came down towards him like the ramp of a flying saucer from a Muggle movie. A light shone from inside the train, warm and golden and making Harry swallow a lump of homesickness. The windows of the Burrow looked like that, seen from a distance.

Harry folded his arms and did his best to stand there looking calm and unaffected, although both he and Dumbledore knew it was pure show. If he got on this train, he was giving up any chance to go back to his own world.

Before he could stop himself, before he could ask Dumbledore or give this world in limbo a chance to react, he turned and flung himself again at the misty tunnel that led home.

The mist closed in around him at once, so constricting that Harry put a hand to his throat and gasped. Then the mist bound his hand to his throat and held him there, and Harry knew he wasn't getting past, not without a lot more practice and willpower and magic.

And he didn't have that right now. He was still just seventeen, someone who had expected to die and hadn't, someone bound to a Horcrux that had gone deeper behind his scar than Dumbledore had expected.

Harry closed his eyes and fell back, his throat aching, his heart aching, his chest setting up a sympathetic, thudding pain. He heard Dumbledore trying to say something, and ignored it. He wasn't interested in yet another explanation for why he couldn't go home.

Another thing occurred to Harry as he turned to face the train. It didn't seem as though he had any wand.

Bitterly, Harry clenched his lips down and laid a hand on the railing that led up the side of the train's lowered ramp. "Can you give me any other advice, _sir_?" he asked, without turning to face Dumbledore.

He heard Dumbledore sigh behind him. "I know that wherever you come out, it will be in the place in that world that corresponds to Platform 9 3/4. I'm afraid I can tell you no more."

"My wand?"

"I don't believe that will be a problem, Harry."

There was a sound at the end of those words that resembled a chuckle, and Harry turned around and stared at Dumbledore. But silver mist had swept in and engulfed that portion of King's Cross, and Harry knew the chance was gone, that he probably had all the information he was going to get.

He shot one more glance at the far, misty portion of the tunnel, out of which the train had come. What would happen if he walked into it without the protection of the train? Would he die? That was probably the Gate of Death. Maybe that way, he could see his friends again.

But maybe not. It had never seemed to have any rhyme or reason to Harry, the way that some people came back as ghosts and other people didn't.

His hands closed down on the railings, and he grunted once. Then he climbed.

* * *

The ramp came up behind him with a hissing sound that resembled Nagini's. Harry stood still long enough to control the instinctive fear reaction, looking around.

The interior of the train resembled a spaceship more than a train, too, although here and there were the doors of compartments. The front of the engine, which Harry had stepped into, was almost completely empty, save for a few chairs that stood rooted on slender, springy columns in the metallic floor. Harry shuddered a little. They didn't look very safe. He wondered if they would stand up to the train's speed as it rushed through various dimensions.

He hurried to the nearest one, anyway, and sat down with his hands gripping the edge of the cushion, because he thought the train might start any second.

But nothing happened, and finally Harry looked up and noticed the enormous stone wheel in the very front of the engine. He got up and approached it slowly. He didn't understand how he hadn't seen it before.

The wheel was a central hub with an elegantly carved rim around that, rim and hub connected by long, slender spokes. Harry touched one of the spokes and winced back. The magic there wasn't painful or Dark, but it was so _much _that it stung his palm.

When he began to pay more attention to the carvings, he realized they were all different. There was a towered castle that reminded him of Hogwarts, a rearing cobra, a dragon in flight, a winged stag, a house that resembled a cross between the Burrow and Privet Drive, a rising sun, a crescent moon, and so many other symbols that Harry gave up on examining them all.

He trailed his fingers along the rim, and the symbols began to light up.

Harry stared. This light wasn't yellow, the way it looked from outside the train, but pale and crackling, like lightning. When he let his hand rest above the symbol of the dragon, it blazed as if it was made of ice. He moved onto the winged stag, and the light followed him.

When he left his hand on the stag for a few seconds, the train shuddered, and the wheel began to creak and turn.

Harry snatched his hand back, his heart pounding. Obviously, the wheel was the way to steer the train, although he had no idea what the symbols actually represented. Some of them seemed to be good luck, since the stag resembled the one his own Patronus made so much, except for the pointed wings arched delicately over its spine. But the house unnerved him, and so did the cobra. Would that particular symbol take him to a world where Voldemort had won?

_There's no way to tell, _Harry realized, with a dim and dull ache in the center of his chest that replaced the pain the mist had caused him. The only thing he had to go on was Dumbledore's vague promise that he would find some home in the distance. That presumably meant that any world he went to could become his home, and any world might also turn against him. But at least he probably wouldn't die the minute he set foot in it.

_If Voldemort won and I have to go to a world where I don't exist, maybe that would mean I was never born. Then no one would know who I was, or want to bother me._

Harry licked his lips and glanced back and forth between a few of the symbols. The problem was, he didn't know if he wanted to go to a world like that, where he could start over fresh with Ron and Hermione, or a world where they would know him. And he had no way of telling which was which.

He hesitated, then let his hand rest on the rising sun. Maybe that would be a symbol of a new hope and new beginning. He didn't think it could really be the symbol of a _Dark _world, anyway.

The pale light gathered in the sun, and shone there. Then it began to rise towards the roof of the engine. Harry hurried back towards one of the seats, gripping the edges of the cushion. This time, the springy column it stood on grew stronger, and Harry gasped as the sudden speed of the train pressed his back against the chair.

He caught one glimpse of mist outside, through the cracks around the lifted ramp and one window, and then they leaped straight into darkness. Harry didn't think he could move. Pressure writhed around his fingers, holding them in place. He was struggling to breathe. Outside, blackness wheeled, and Harry had to fight to hold his eyes open even to see that. The pale light blazing from the wheel and the yellow light from the rest of the train seemed a very fragile beacon in the middle of all that space.

But he kept on looking, and suddenly the speed lessened and a sight sprang into being that well-merited the struggle he'd had to keep his eyes open. Or at least, _he _thought so.

The train was passing through a clustered system of lights, all of them bright gold or bright blue-green, and the web that connected them made the tracks for the train to run on. Harry heard a faint, delicate sound emanating from the lights. When he squinted more closely, he could see that they were turning in the midst of glittering crystalline spheres, each of them studded with stars and enclosing a portion of that darkness, which suddenly seemed less threatening and more like the velvet in a jewelry box, holding priceless treasures.

Harry thought he could have stayed there forever listening to the music and watching the light. If this had to be his afterlife, it was at least beautiful, and the notes and the shades of color changed from moment to moment.

But the tracks began to run down, and the speed became hard enough to make Harry close his eyes briefly. During that moment, it seemed, they passed through a soundless explosion of radiance, and when Harry opened his eyes again, the darkness was gone. The train rushed along in silence for a few minutes, or what seemed to be that amount of time, while Harry got his breath back.

Then it stopped, and the ramp swung open. A grey, ashy light filtered in. Harry stood up and moved over to it, standing for a second so he could hang onto the walls. His legs were shaky, maybe just from the speed.

What he looked out on was a mound of rubble, mostly stone, some plastic and metal. Harry had to close his eyes when he saw human legs and arms sticking out of it.

The train's ramp led stubbornly down onto the top of the rubble, and Harry's grip grew whiter and whiter on the edges of the doorway as he considered it.

He could turn his back, he thought. He could go and touch the wheel again, and it would take him somewhere else.

But what if this world was almost exactly like his own except the war had been worse? What if Ron and Hermione were waiting for him here, mourning him because he had died, and he was giving up his best chance to find his place? Sure, he could try touching the sun symbol again and coming back later, but who knew if it would look any different.

He took a shaky breath and stepped down the ramp, walking to what turned out to be the bottom of the pile. It seemed the train had no desire to make him break his neck.

When he glanced back again, ramp and train and light and tracks were gone, and his body sagged a little; robes had coalesced on him, the same dull grey color as the light here. Harry spread his arms for balance and started to pick his way over the blasted landscape, towards what looked like the edge of a street.

Someone appeared in front of him before he could do that. No, _Apparated _in front of him. Harry jerked to a stop, falling into a defensive crouch and raising his right hand before he remembered that he had no wand. _Goddamnit._

The man stood observing him instead of attacking, the way Harry had assumed any denizen of this world would when they were at what was obviously a battle site. Harry observed him back, and stood up and folded his arms. He felt his fringe fall back from his lightning bolt scar, but he doubted it mattered. Things already seemed to be a lot different in this world.

The man was extremely tall, with dark hair hanging lank to his shoulders, so at first Harry automatically thought, _Snape. _But there were large grey circles in the wizard's hair over his temples, so regular that they looked like the marks of headphones. And Harry knew the face wasn't Snape's, anyway. The nose wasn't so long, the eyes were darker and narrower, the features were handsomer.

He looked familiar, in fact. Harry squinted, trying to see him as someone he knew from his own time.

He seemed to see two things at the same time: the way the man's face would look without those grey circles in his hair, and the long yew wand he clutched.

But he didn't even have time to move before the man pointed the wand more firmly at him and said in a quiet, resonant voice, "I know you are not the Dark Lord, not with that scar. My name is Tom Riddle, leader of the Light Resistance. Who the hell are you?"


	2. The Sunlord

Thank you for all the reviews!

_Chapter Two—The Sunlord_

_Tom Riddle…_

Harry knew he spent at least a minute staring, with his hand raised at his side as if he could snatch Riddle's wand away from him or defend himself with an empty palm, and not responding to the question. On the other hand, maybe that helped convince this man, this stranger with an enemy's face, that Harry wasn't whoever he'd feared Harry was. Riddle stared back, his mouth setting more and more firmly in something that looked like a mixture of a sneer and a frown.

"The eyes are the same color," he said, as if talking to himself. "The hair…the same. But the scar couldn't be faked." He shook his head, and then he seemed to have decided that he'd given Harry long enough to declare himself. "What's your name?" His voice deepened, and his wand swung around to point directly at Harry's heart.

Harry swallowed. He could try a fake name, but he knew nothing about what had just happened here—it had to have just happened, some of the rubble around them was still smoking—and he thought Riddle would know if he lied. Harry didn't want to lie to someone who could destroy him the first time he stepped into a new world.

"Harry Potter."

He meant to go on, to explain something about Dumbledore and the train and the way he'd been brought here, but Riddle vaulted the broken stones that lay in between them in one go and had his wand pressed up against Harry's throat. Harry coughed and choked, as a gentle hint to Riddle to move his wand away. Riddle took no notice. He leaned harder, in fact, and hissed into Harry's face, in a damp way that made Harry sure he could still talk to serpents here, no matter if he was a Light wizard.

"You _dare _to use his name?" Riddle whispered. "I should destroy you for that presumption, and I would, except your magic doesn't feel like his and the scar on your forehead is different and I want to hear what you're going to say before I kill you." His wand reached up and moved the fringe back from Harry's forehead so he could see the scar again. Harry found himself bracing for the pain automatically, but nothing happened. Riddle carried on frowning at the scar. "That's a curse scar, I know it is, but they don't usually leave a defined shape."

He glanced back at Harry again, seeming to remember that he was more than his forehead and a curious scar, and his face grew sharp and tight. "Now," he whispered, using his wand under Harry's chin to force him to look more at the sky than Riddle's expression. "Tell me why you're using the name and the appearance of the Dark Lord."

* * *

_The Dark Lord? _

Harry felt as though Riddle had already killed him, and his body just hadn't decided he was dead yet. His throat choked off his breath and his world reeled and there was a heavy pain in his chest that surely, surely, would blossom into a heart attack any minute. Then he could die after all and go be with his parents and Remus and Sirius the way he already should have. Maybe he would even get to see Tonks and Fred, too.

Dumbledore's voice rolled through his head again, explaining. _The magic will not stretch to accommodate you. It can only allow you even into another dimension if the Harry Potter in that place never existed, or died, or is so fundamentally different that you would be adding a new person to the world, not a replica of one that exists._

Harry reckoned he hadn't paid enough attention to that last part. He had thought that Harry Potter here must be dead, or unfamiliar, and that Riddle was angry because he thought Harry was trying to take over the body of a friend he'd had, a Harry he'd known, who'd died.

But _fundamentally different…_

Yeah, Harry supposed he really was fucking fundamentally different here if he'd ended up as the Dark Lord and Tom Riddle was a Light wizard.

* * *

Riddle called his attention back by rapping his wand against Harry's Adam's apple. Harry choked again and glared at him. Riddle returned the glare with interest, but already he had eased a step back and stood with his head cocked like a vulture who wanted to listen to Harry's heart beating instead of just pecking his eyes out.

"The name was truly a surprise to you," Riddle murmured. "Or the _information, _perhaps, since you know the name well enough to use it. Hmmm. I am never mistaken on that front." No bragging in that tone, either, Harry noted grudgingly. Well, maybe Riddle really had earned the right to say that he never was. "Explain to me who you are."

"My name _is _Harry Potter," Harry said, deciding that he might as well clear that up right away. Fuck if he was going to take an alias that _Tom Riddle _gave him. "But I come from another version of this world. One where _you _went mad a long time ago and became the next Dark Lord. You took the name Lord Voldemort—"

He stopped, because Riddle had made a gesture so abrupt and hard that it was shut up or get a wand in the teeth. Riddle leaned backwards from him as though Harry carried a contamination, and Harry grimaced but stood still. It was bloody hard, though, being glared at by someone like this.

"How did you know that name?" Riddle whispered.

"Did you not just listen to me?" Harry demanded. "In my world, a sixteen-year-old version of you told me, when I was trying to rescue my friend Ginny Weasley from a basilisk and he was a piece of soul imprisoned in a diary. Anyway. You came after me when I was a baby and tried to cast the Killing Curse at me because I was prophesied to defeat you, but my mother's love protected me and so the scar just left this curse instead. I finally defeated you by going and letting you—I mean, Lord Voldemort—cast the Killing Curse at me again, but Dumbledore said that changed me too much and I'd passed through the Gates of Death, so my only option is to find another world that has a space open for me. The first place I came was here."

Riddle was silent, staring at him. Harry lifted his chin. _He _couldn't help it if his story sounded slightly ridiculous. He had done all he could to avoid this, including trying to die. It was Dumbledore's mistake that had made it necessary for him to come here.

"I don't understand this," Riddle whispered. "You're not him, that much seems obvious, and yet you speak things you cannot know, but he might. However, the story you tell would also explain how you can know those things."

"Yes, it does." Harry raised his hand and pushed at his yew wand, missing his holly one at the moment more than he could say. He wondered how in the world he was supposed to get along here without a wand, and why Dumbledore hadn't sounded concerned about it. Then again, he was beginning to wonder how real the Dumbledore he had met was, and whether it was possible that he was just a projection of Harry's thoughts. "Look, can you tell me what you're going to do, kill me or imprison me? It's getting wearisome to wonder."

Riddle closed his eyes as if listening to something. Maybe he was. Harry stood there, looking around at the rubble, and remembered another thing Dumbledore had said (always assuming one could trust anything Dumbledore had said at this point). He would always appear at the location of Platform 9¾, no matter what world he arrived in.

But here…

"Did they attack and destroy King's Cross?" he whispered, forgetting for the moment that he didn't really know who "they" were. He had only Riddle's word, and the evidence from his own world that Riddle lied a lot. "What happened?"

Riddle opened his eyes and gave Harry a thin smile that made him want to step backwards. But Riddle's thin hand was on his arm—thin but strong, Harry noticed—and he said, "An attack. We are at war. Dumbledore, my mentor and the first leader of the Light Resistance, died a few months ago. He would not use the tactics that would have strangled the war in its cradle." Riddle grinned. "That's all right. I can."

Harry stared at him, a little dazed. "I can't believe _you're _a Light wizard."

Riddle cocked his head. "Really? But a powerful Light wizard offered to train me, once he saw I also had power, and Light magic is more powerful than Dark."

"Bollocks," Harry said, before he could stop himself.

Riddle offered him another grin. "You will be a pleasure to train. The way I should have trained the boy whose name and face you bear." His face turned so grim that Harry flinched. "Instead of leaving it up to someone else."

Harry shook his head. "I don't know what you're talking about, as should be obvious by now," he said. "Do you really want to continue this conversation here? Or could we go somewhere else where I could eat and get warm and hear more about the strangeness of how _I _wound up a Dark Lord?"

Riddle looked at him for a moment with no expression at all. Harry stared back. It was true that he wouldn't be able to stop Riddle if he chose to curse Harry, but at the moment, that was hardly relevant. He was _cold, _and this world already seemed like it would be no home for him even if he could technically live here.

"You're very different," Riddle said softly. "I look forward to hearing how different."

He held out his arm. Harry had only a second to figure out what he wanted, and by then, Riddle had grabbed him—he seemed more handsy than Lord Voldemort had, but just as impatient—and they vanished.

* * *

They appeared in the middle of a courtyard covered by a light fall of snow. Harry frowned and looked in a circle. He had assumed without thinking about it that any world he arrived in would be in the beginning of May, the same as the one he'd left, but maybe not.

His breath caught when he saw what loomed above them.

It was clearly Hogwarts, but a Hogwarts made over and ready for war. The towers were surrounded, on their tops, by looming battlements of dark stone. The walls themselves were hung with what Harry thought at first were ivy vines, but then realized were wards, green and sometimes gold, snapping back and forth as though they were hunting for life in the cracks of the stones. A huge moat flowed around the castle, dark and slimy water Harry thought had probably been diverted from the lake. As he watched, something came to life in the water, lifting a dark green snout that didn't look like a squid's. Riddle hissed at it in Parseltongue.

Harry tried to ignore it—he had hoped that particular gift would fade after the Horcrux was out of him—but it seemed he was doomed to understand snakes no matter what. "_Do not eat him,_" Riddle was saying, "_He is a guest._"

"I notice you don't say friend," Harry muttered, and didn't try to anticipate whether it would come out in Parseltongue or in English.

Riddle stared hard at him, then twisted his lips in what was likely meant to be a grin but didn't do a good job of it. "Remarkable," he said, drawing Harry towards the moat with a hard hold. "You really are different from him."

"And you're not trying to murder me or torture me," Harry retorted. "It's an improvement."

Riddle nodded with the same smile, and waited for a moment. Then the snake, or whatever it was, rose from the water, its back arched so that it led across the moat like the curve of a bridge. Harry looked at the slimy skin, grey-green with either water or moss, and swallowed slowly.

"Not so many words now?" Riddle asked, and turned to face the snake. "Hold on tight to me. I do not want you slipping."

It was the other way around, Harry soon discovered. He was walking beside Riddle, forcibly, because Riddle held onto his wrist, and simply manipulated Harry around the points where the bridge narrowed, and tugged him back up straight again when Harry's feet started to slip. By the time they descended onto the other side, Harry thought that he wouldn't like to try to find his way over the bridge by himself, but with someone next to him, it hadn't been that bad.

"And here you are, a place that I'm sure is familiar to you no matter what your incarnation," Riddle said, shoving Harry ahead of him.

Harry caught his balance and stared curiously around the entrance hall. It was a much smaller place than it was in the Hogwarts he remembered, the walls closer in and a tunnel leading further into the school. Harry could just see down the tunnel to where it turned, presumably in the direction of the Great Hall. There was more of the same dark stone that enclosed the Towers, and more of the vine-like wards crawling up and down.

"I like what you've done with the place," Harry said over his shoulder to Riddle. He had to maintain that sense of distance and humor, or he would go out of his mind.

"Of course you do," Riddle said, in an absolutely bland voice, and shoved Harry ahead of him with a hand in the middle of his back. "Let's show you to your new quarters."

Harry bit back a ton of questions, including who else lived in the castle and why they had quarters available to give him if people wanted to live in the heart of this safe place, as seemed likely. Riddle was striding quickly now, but had released his arm. Harry thought Riddle probably just _assumed _he would follow, and bristled.

On the other hand, what else did he have to do right now? He couldn't Apparate without a wand. He followed.

The tunnel narrowed further, and just when Harry had started holding his breath and thinking about his cupboard, it plunged into a dark hole in the floor. Riddle swung himself down onto the rungs of a ladder that apparently descended. Harry watched the hole sweep past Riddle's shoulders, barely broader than they were, and felt a little sick.

"No way," he whispered.

Riddle sighed at him and called _Lumos _to his wand, extending it down. "I assure you that I'm not leading you into a pit of snakes, Harry," he said. "Not that it would matter if I did, since you would presumably talk them round." He looked at Harry with coldly curious eyes. "You will simply _have_ to tell me how you came by that gift."

Harry gritted his teeth, reminded himself again about the lack of a wand, and swept the shapeless cloak he wore back from his shoulders so he could climb down the ladder. The metal of the rungs seemed to stick and cling to his fingers, and he had no idea whatsoever about what lay at the bottom. Maybe the replacement for the Great Hall. Maybe a kind of strategy room.

_Maybe a dungeon._

Well, Hogwarts had had plenty of dungeons and to spare, he knew that, and Merlin knew someone like Riddle would feel at home in them.

Harry rolled his eyes at his own fears, and gritted his teeth, and continued to climb.

The ladder unrolled beneath his feet until he began to wonder if he had dreamed the train and Dumbledore and the journey to this world. Maybe even his world, too. Maybe he'd dreamed of everything but the climbing. Then he would wonder what—

The floor jarred his feet unpleasantly, but Harry swung to the side and hopped off the ladder. Once again they were in a tunnel, but this one at least had a roof and widened walls and light at the end. Against the light, Harry could make out the angular form of Riddle, striding along as though he had an important meeting to get to. Maybe he did, for all Harry knew. He knew Dumbledore was dead in this world, but who might still be alive?

He swallowed and quickened his steps to follow Riddle. He wanted to see his friends again, if they existed here. Perhaps he would get to see other Weasleys, too. Hell, even the sight of Snape and Malfoy would be welcome at this point.

Anyone who wasn't Tom Bloody Riddle.

They came out in what had to be the replacement for the Great Hall. Instead of an enchanted ceiling showing the weather, it had one that showed piles of rubble, smoking houses, the bones of villages, and other castles standing tall and strong against the glow of curses, scenes that shifted slowly in and out, one fading and another replacing it. The tables in the room were gathered in a circle beneath the center of the ceiling, and around them was an outer ring of chairs. Plain wood and stone, Harry saw as he looked. He blinked, a little surprised at the lack of luxury. He had assumed that this Tom Riddle would at least insist on having satin cushions and marble walls.

_Maybe that's for his private quarters, _Harry thought, and caught his breath and hurried faster when he saw a small number of men and women sitting at one of the curved tables. Two of them had red hair, and another had a wooden leg and chipped nose that made him look like Mad-Eye Moody.

He jerked to a stop when everybody but Riddle and Moody whirled to their feet and aimed their wands at him, though. Several of them were clearly on the verge of casting curses. Harry rubbed his palms on his trousers. _Dark Lord, here. Right._

"He isn't who he looks like," said Riddle carelessly, striding past the people on their feet and falling into a seat beside the Moody lookalike. Harry watched him as he picked up a wooden goblet waiting for him and cast some kind of charm on it that made steaming liquid fill it. From the way his dark grey eyes darted back and forth from Harry to the others, Harry could only come to one conclusion. _He's enjoying this. _

But then, Tom Riddle had always been a bastard. That was the only commonality Harry had found so far between this world and his own.

Oddly enough, that steadied him. He nodded to the others, lifted his hands in front of him, and said, "My name is Harry Potter, but I'm from a different world. I can show you something that should prove I'm different, if you'll let me move my hands without blowing them off."

A tall woman standing off to the side snorted. "Well, he's not him," she said, and tucked her wand away. "The Dark Lord doesn't have any sense of humor at all. What?" she added, looking at Harry and fluffing her hair. "Do I have something on my nose?"

Harry became aware he was staring, and looked back at the others. But this Hermione was taller than the one he had left behind, and spoke with even more of a confident, crisp snap in her voice, and stood with the bearing of a soldier. He hoped she had had a chance to make a difference when fighting this other version of himself.

"I don't trust him," said a Weasley with a collar of linked stones around his neck that flashed different colors in the light as he shifted. It took Harry even longer to realize it was Percy, but a Percy with harder, more suspicious eyes and a wand that looked as though it had a golden glow shining through the wood. "Anyone could come up with a disguise, and anyone could come up with a sense of humor."

"But who would have the daring to imitate the Dark Lord?" Hermione waved her hand and sat back down. "Use your common sense, Percival."

Harry held back his snicker, and met the eyes of the nearest Weasley, who looked like Charlie, if Charlie never smiled. "You were going to show us something?" Charlie asked, exquisitely polite.

Harry nodded and pushed his fringe back. Several people leaned in close to get a look at the lightning bolt scar. Harry held his breath and reminded himself that he had invited this. His hands didn't tremble where he held them down at his side, and that was all he could really ask for.

"A curse scar." Bill in this universe didn't have the earring or the werewolf-claw scars from Greyback that Harry had last seen him with. He did have a silver left hand, which flashed brighter than Percy's jewels as he sat heavily down and stared at Harry. "Did he tell you where he came from, Sunlord?"

Harry found himself looking around for Dumbledore automatically, but it was Riddle who answered, leaning down the table. "Yes. Another world. I found him in the rubble of the Platform, and it's true that he appeared out of thin air and I saw a shadow like a train behind him, and felt the rumble of powerful magic. What he says—certain details that he was privy to and I've never told anyone—confirms for me that he's telling the truth. There would be no reason for _him_ to find out those details and then not use them against me. This one _can't_ use them." He took another sip from the goblet, never removing his eyes from Harry.

"What are those details?" The Weasley Harry had kept his eyes away from the longest moved forwards now. Harry swallowed as he looked at Ron's face, but a Ron he didn't know, who watched him with cold eyes and kept his hand on his wand as though he expected Harry to draw one and attack any second. His nose had been broken before, and his freckles were more frequent and like dots of blood. Harry wondered how long he'd been fighting in this war. Maybe this Ron and Hermione were older than him, but he didn't think so.

"Ones that concern me and the path I might have taken, and are of no concern to anyone else," Riddle said pleasantly, and swallowed what was apparently left in the goblet, because he pushed it away. A house-elf appeared and took it, vanishing without the pop that they usually had in Harry's world. A second later, it appeared with a replacement goblet.

"You _need _to tell us if we're going to trust him!" Ron turned around and stared at Riddle.

Riddle looked back, his eyebrows rising so fast that Harry winced a little, for Ron's sake. "No," he said, his voice lowering and deepening. "I don't."

Ron wavered for a second, then turned away and collapsed at the table, burying his head in his arms. Hermione laid one hand on his shoulder, lightly, and turned and looked at Harry. "Why don't you tell us what you can?"

Harry gulped and nodded, and took the one empty chair, next to Riddle. He'd thought maybe Riddle wouldn't go on looking at him now that he had to turn to the side and do it, but of course he turned around at once, with a lazy smile on his face that suggested there was nothing he liked better. Harry found himself avoiding those dark grey eyes as he looked at Hermione's face. "As long as you tell me what _you _can."

Hermione gave him a fragile smile. "First, do you know everyone at this table? I'm curious about how different our worlds actually are."

Harry looked around. He nodded at Mad-Eye Moody, who was still watching him with close, critical eyes, but hadn't started up. Maybe he could see right away, with his magical eye, that Harry wasn't who he looked like. Harry also hoped that Moody could see he was no threat without a wand.

The woman on the other side of him took more squinting, but eventually Harry realized she was Andromeda Black. She had her hand tightly locked with the battle-hardened man beside her, who had to be her husband, Ted Tonks. His face looked different here, more tired and with a lot of scar tissue gathered by his eyes.

The man beyond _him_, Harry frankly stared at. He looked so much like Sirius that Harry had almost opened his mouth to yell his godfather's name, but no, Harry saw when he looked, this one was much younger. His black hair and strong jawline and grey eyes all shouted Black, though. Harry took a deep breath, wondering if Regulus had survived in this world, where there had been no Voldemort to betray.

Before Harry could say anything, the man rolled his eyes and held up one hand. "Yes, I know that you're probably about to call me by one of my cousins' names," he said. "Because people in _this _world do it, too. They can't believe I gave up the family I was born to."

Harry blinked, hard, and slumped back in his chair. The voice was familiar, even though the features weren't… "Malfoy?" he whispered weakly.

Malfoy gave him a smile hard enough to cut. "Black," he said. "Draco Black."

"How?" Harry asked, and then winced a little when Malfoy—did Harry _have _to call him Draco?—pulled back and his face slammed shut as though a door had fallen into place. But surely it was natural to ask a question? They knew and most seemed to accept that he was from a different world, after all.

"Tell him, Mr. Black."

That was Riddle, his voice as cold and heavy as Nagini. Draco glanced once over at Riddle, and ended up closing his eyes and nodding. He turned back to Harry, who sat with his hands clasped tightly in his lap. He wished he could make the question unsaid. On the one hand, he did want to know what had happened to make Malfoy so different from the one he knew. On the other hand, no one should have to obey Tom Riddle.

_Unless he's really saved their lives and been guiding them all this time, the way Dumbledore would have._

And that was another story Harry wanted to hear, probably more than he wanted to hear anyone else's at this table.

"My father decided that peace and power weren't enough for him," Draco said, his eyes distant and shaded. "Neither was money. He wanted to play a part in ending Muggles' lives and have an excuse for killing them, and for that, he needed a Dark Lord. So he played a part in corrupting Harry Potter—maybe I should say the one born to this world, in view of who you are—and turning him to the Dark. It was a disgusting process, and one beneath a Malfoy. So I struck back the only way I could, and took away what he valued most in the world, his heir and the continuation of his family line. I took on my mother's family name and family blood. Any children born to me now will have Mother's parents as their blood grandparents. In effect, I became my mother's brother."

Harry blinked a lot before he finally nodded in acceptance. He knew from the way Riddle watched him with mocking eyes that he wasn't very convincing, but he reckoned he didn't have to be. Harry didn't have to understand everything. He had asked for Malfoy's story, and had it, in condensed form.

And given that he didn't act the same or look the same, maybe it would be no great hardship, after all, to call Malfoy Draco.

Harry let his gaze continue around the table. There was Fleur, who examined him in silence. She seemed much less cheerful than she did in his world. But then again, there was no sign that she and Bill really cared about each other, and her face was lined and care-worn as much as anyone else at the table.

He caught his breath at the sight of the next person in line. "Neville," he whispered. He didn't get up and go over to him, but his legs twitched with the impulse to do so. He felt more than saw Riddle smirk beside him.

Neville, taller than he was in Harry's world and with muscles that bulged along his arms, smiled tentatively at him. "Did we know each other?" he asked. "We didn't all that well, here. I was in Gryffindor and _he _was in Slytherin, and there was no way that we could spend much time together."

Harry nodded. "In my world, there was a prophecy that a certain child would defeat the Dark Lord." He took care to keep his eyes away from Riddle, not knowing how much the man would like him to announce about that so soon. "There were two candidates for the child, though. I was one, and you were the other."

Neville's eyes widened so far that they made him look comical, and Harry had to admit that he smiled again. _That _wasmorelike the Neville Harry knew. "Wow," Neville breathed. "You were both born at the end of July? So were _we_. The prophecy had something to do with that?"

Harry nodded and started to say something else, but Riddle cut in, maybe bored, maybe prudent, because Harry might have told them too much about fighting the Dark Lord in his own world. "We must discuss the current nature of the war. This Harry's arrival, I believe, could give us a powerful advantage."

Half the table winced. Harry thought he knew why. Even though Riddle wasn't referring to the Harry of this universe, using his name so casually was like Dumbledore calling Voldemort "Tom." It just didn't happen unless someone was supremely confident in their own power.

Harry turned to face Riddle. Riddle raised one eyebrow at him. Harry took a deep breath. He would have to become more comfortable with him if he was going to join his war, Harry thought, and especially if this world was going to become his home.

"Why?" Harry asked. "I'm just a random person who was involved in a totally different prophecy and killed a totally different Dark Lord. I don't even have a wand."

Riddle sat up. "That's ridiculous," he said, eyes piercing, as if he suspected that Harry had hidden his wand in a pocket and was playing a silly trick on them. "Of course you have a wand. I would sense your untamed magic blazing out of your core if you did not, and I do not."

"Well, maybe you're wrong, sometimes," Harry snapped back. He could feel some of the Weasleys edging their chairs away from him. Draco remained immobile, and so did Andromeda and her husband, who hadn't spoken yet. Moody looked bored, Neville nervous. "I didn't bring a wand when I—died, and then I'd passed through the Gates of Death and couldn't go back for it. So I don't have any ability to access my magic."

Riddle settled back and gave him a thin smile. "Have you tried Summoning your wand?"

"From another universe?" Harry rolled his eyes. "I'm not that powerful. I was never that powerful," he added. The last thing he needed was for people here to start believing crazy things about him the way people in his own world did.

His throat almost closed as he thought about that, though. At the moment, he'd have happily hugged Rita Skeeter. _Home._

"Summon it," Riddle repeated.

Harry glanced around the table to see if anyone else thought Riddle was mental, but the only one who wore anything other than a neutral or blank expression was Hermione. She gave him a little nod, and Harry nodded back, although he doubted the Harry of this universe had been best friends with this Hermione.

Harry held out his hands out in front of him, cleared his throat, and said, "_Accio _wand."

There was silence, long enough that Harry started to open his eyes and smile at Riddle. But then there was a whistle of wind like air parting around something in flight, and a heavy weight smacked into Harry's hands.

He knew at once that it wasn't right, it couldn't be. Holly wood and phoenix feather had never weighed this much. He looked down—

He was holding the Elder Wand.

"_No_," Harry said loudly, and dropped the Elder Wand on the tabletop. It rolled down until it collided with Riddle's goblet, and clicked to a stop.

The next moment, there came the sound of something soft and crumbly falling apart. Riddle silently picked up his goblet and showed Harry the base of it. The wood had gone rotten.

Harry shook his head. His throat was as dry as those ashes, as that rot. He put his hands over his eyes and held them there, trembling.

There were ways that he could be the Master of the Elder Wand. He could see it, could see the way that the wand had traced out its path, from Dumbledore's hand, to Draco Malfoy's, to his when he took Malfoy's wand. Voldemort wielding it would have been no trouble at all. And perhaps, if the wand really was one of the Deathly Hallows and as powerful as that fairy story talked about, then it could have the magic to follow him between worlds.

That didn't mean he _wanted _it. And the twinkle in Dumbledore's eyes when he promised that Harry not having a wand wouldn't be a problem just made Harry want to slaughter him all the more. If Dumbledore had been in front of him right now, still alive and breathing, Harry would have killed him before Snape could.

A hand clapped him on the shoulder, and Harry started. As he was lifting his head, Riddle said, "I believe that our guest has had a hard and traumatic time, and that he needs to rest in order to get his power back in order. And if he is to be of any use to us in our war, then I need time to explain the circumstances to him and let him choose his side."

Moody scoffed and said something that sounded like, "As if you would let him choose any other side."

"Oh, everyone has a free choice," Riddle said softly. "Which one did I offer you, Alastor, and which one did you make?"

There was silence after that, and then everyone shuffled away from the table. Harry looked up in time to see Draco turning to look back at Harry, his face sharp and thoughtful, and Hermione waving to him. Ron looked as if he might have done the same thing, but in the end, his hand dropped back to his side. They took other tunnels that led away into the mass of stone Hogwarts seemed to have become, presumably going to their rooms.

"Come." Riddle stood and extended a hand. Harry looked at it dully until Riddle snapped his fingers, and Harry realized that Riddle expected Harry to rise and follow him. Harry sighed and stood. Riddle gripped his shoulder for one second, then turned his back.

"Remember to bring your wand," Riddle added over his shoulder. "I recognize it, you know, although in this world it was buried with Albus."

Harry rubbed his hand over his mouth and snatched the Elder Wand as quickly as he could, sticking it into his pocket. His hand was only in contact with it for a few seconds, and even those seconds felt as though they spread a thin layer of grime over his palm and fingers.

"Then you do believe that I came from another world?" he managed to ask Riddle, who didn't stop and didn't slow down, just continued walking. They had entered a tunnel that ran in a different direction from all the others, and the roof was rising. Harry was grateful for that. He would have hated to look like a coward by, well, cowering. "That I didn't just steal the Elder Wand from Dumbledore's grave or something?"

"Albus summoned the Elder Wand like that," Riddle said over his shoulder. His voice was calm, but the force of his eyes was like a blow. Harry winced back from it. "I know that it responds to none but its true master. And how could you have gained mastery of it once he died, undefeated? But it could exist in another world."

Harry nodded, and kept quiet. If Riddle actually believed him and was willing to give him a place here, it was a good idea not to question him.

_Even if I do remember who he was in my world._

Riddle opened a door at the end of the corridor by nothing more than passing his hand across it, as though it were a Gringotts vault. But the door swung inwards instead of vanishing, and Harry had to catch his breath when he saw what lay beyond. He wouldn't have thought that such comfort and luxury could still exist in the besieged fortress that Hogwarts had become.

There were dark blue walls here, and a series of tapestries hung on them, muffling the stone and wood with brilliant colors. On the floor was a single long rug that Riddle walked down. Harry stepped onto it, and sighed as a Warming Charm rose from the cloth and into his toes. The cloth was the gentlest thing he'd ever walked on, but not slippery, like silk. Harry reckoned that Riddle wanted to be able to turn around and strike at a moment's notice, if he had to.

The room seemed to be one huge round one, with only two doors on the far side, standing open. Harry saw the gleam of white tile from beyond one that seemed to announce a bathroom, and a corner of a bed through the other. This central room had a table like the one in the modified hall they'd left behind, bookshelves along one quadrant of the circular walls, a smaller table for eating, one curve with all the clutter and bustle of a Potions lab, and two or three comfortable chairs in front of the fireplace, which took up most of the wall that swept towards the door. Colors gleamed everywhere, green and blue and black, making Harry feel as though he was underwater.

"Now," Riddle said, sitting down in the larger of the two chairs before the fire and fixing Harry with an unblinking look, "you'd like to take a shower. Go in and do that. You'll find towels waiting. There are a few clothes that the elves will Transfigure and bring to you."

"How do you know I want a shower?" Harry snapped back, trying to draw himself up. The Elder Wand burned in his pocket. It probably wanted to leap out and skewer Riddle through the heart or something, if that story about it was true. At the moment, Harry was close to granting it the opportunity. "Why should I take one?"

"It's not you that wants a shower," Riddle said. "It's me that wants you to have a one, because you smell like ash and blood."

Harry flushed and muttered something. He didn't even know what it was. Riddle just kept watching him, as distant and aloof as a hawk, and Harry finally walked across to the bathroom and stepped into it.

There was white tile everywhere, except for the wall inside the tub itself, which was decorated with a mosaic of sea creatures, glittering green turtles and blue water snakes rising to a crystalline surface. Harry slung his clothes off, ignoring the ashes that did indeed tumble to the floor with them. Did Riddle like the sea? Hell, did Voldemort?

_Not that I'll ever know the answer to that question, since I'm not going home, _Harry told himself, and stepped into the tub.

The water began to pour down at once from a showerhead Harry hadn't noticed, thick and warm, while a glass door coalesced into being on the edge of the tub to keep the water from spilling on the floor. Harry shut his eyes and ducked his head, trying, as best he could, to let the warmth rub away his tension and his anger as well as the smell.

Here he was, stuck in another world where apparently _he _was the Dark Lord, at the mercy of the man who back home was his worst enemy, and with only the man's own Order of the Phoenix to believe and support him.

Harry didn't like it. But he supposed that he would have to accept it the way he'd accepted being a Parselmouth and a Tri-Wizard Champion and the enemy of the Ministry in his fifth year. He'd got through those by pushing forwards. He would do the same here.

At least the water ran long enough to fill the shower with a good cloud of steam, and when Harry stepped out of it, the large towel wrapped around him and made him sigh as it rubbed his hair. Harry took hold of the end and did it himself, because the towel was being a bit too vigorous, maybe assuming his hair would never get clean otherwise. But by the time he dressed himself in the—of course—green shirt and trousers with silver accents that had appeared on the hooks on the wall for him, he did at least feel more relaxed.

That lasted until he opened the bathroom door and his elbow brushed the Elder Wand, sticking out of the pocket of his trousers where he hadn't put it. Harry shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and continued walking out anyway.

"You _do _do a lot of sighing."

Harry opened his eyes and turned towards the fireplace. Tom Riddle waited there, his arms cocked up so that his elbows projected into the air and his hands rested on the cloth behind him. His face was shadowed by the position he sat in, and Harry found it hard to see much more than the way his face was angled towards Harry.

Harry walked over and took a seat in the chair in front of Riddle, the way he knew he was meant to. The rising tide of anger nearly overwhelmed his rational thought.

But he had made lots of decisions in anger in his fifth year, and almost none of them had turned out to be the right ones. He clasped his hands in front of him and asked, "Are you going to tell me what turned out differently here?"

"It's hard to do that," Riddle said, sounding as old and immovable as the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets, "until you tell me the way you _think _things should have turned out."

Harry bit his lip until he could feel blood under his teeth. He knew he could tell Riddle his side of the story and Riddle could keep his own secret, not talking about any of the things that Harry wanted to hear. He _could _do it, the bastard. He might.

But Harry had to take the risk. There was no way that he would learn what he needed to know otherwise, and Riddle was probably the best-disposed to him out of all of them. Moody seemed to distrust him, Hermione might or might not know what he needed to know, these Weasleys weren't his friends, and Neville and Draco and Andromeda and Mr. Tonks were unknown quantities.

So Harry took a deep breath, and began talking.

He told the silently listening Riddle about the attack Voldemort had made on his parents, and how he'd become the final Horcrux. He skipped over the Dursleys, because he thought things were either the same here or the Dursleys wouldn't have contributed to changing them.

But he talked about how he hadn't known he was a wizard, how he made friends with Ron and was Sorted into Gryffindor, how they made friends with Hermione and stepped Quirrell and were convinced that Snape was the real villain all the time. Riddle never moved. Harry still couldn't see his eyes well, and thought he might have gone to sleep.

But when he finished up the tale of how he'd rescued the Philosopher's Stone, Riddle stirred and asked a question. "Why did Dumbledore hide it in the school?"

Harry shrugged. "He thought it would be safer there than in Gringotts. There was a raid on Gringotts not long after Hagrid took the Stone. I know now that was Quirrell, with you—sorry—Voldemort on the back of his head, going after it."

Riddle said nothing for a bit, then motioned him to go on, with a flutter of his fingers. Harry looked at the fire as he talked about second year, the Chamber of Secrets, the basilisk, finding out he was a Parselmouth.

"That came from the Horcrux that you carried inside you?"

The question, in the middle of the story this time instead of at the end, made Harry look up and blink. "That's what Dumbledore said," he said cautiously.

"But I would be able to tell if you had a piece of another's soul in you." Riddle didn't explain that, and Harry, rolling his eyes, decided that he would just have to accept that Riddle had some sort of defenses on the school that would detect it. "You don't have it now."

Harry shrugged. "No. I can tell you more about getting it out of me and getting rid of it if you want, but I thought I would tell that in its proper place."

Riddle leaned forwards, his eyes emerging out of the shadows. Harry could see the intense greyness of them now, brighter than Malfoy's, brighter than a few of the silver ornaments that Harry had noticed on the fireplace mantle. "But the piece is gone now," Riddle whispered, "however it happened. _Why is it _that you can still speak Parseltongue?"

Harry tried to speak, and found that he had no saliva left. He settled for shaking his head, unnerved. There was no reason that he should still have that ability, but he didn't know the answer.

Riddle continued to look at him for a second, then leaned back into his shadowed nook. "Go on," he said, in a voice that rang portentously.

Harry swallowed, and did so. The story of the fight with the basilisk and the shade of Tom Riddle made Riddle stir, but he said nothing, although Harry saw him nodding. _Probably remembering that was how I knew about Voldemort, _Harry thought.

The man in front of him must have had the same dreams and the same temptations as the Tom Riddle in Harry's world at one time, even if he had just kept them as fantasies and never done anything with them.

Harry remembered that as he began talking about the story of his third year and Sirius's escape and Harry's eventual discovery of his innocence. Riddle might be one of the few allies he had here; maybe he was even telling the truth about Harry being the Dark Lord, and Harry would have to fight with Riddle's "Light Resistance" to make any difference or have any place here.

But Riddle still wasn't a _nice _person. And Harry got none of the sense of tormented conflict from him that he had from Snape, when he watched the man's memories before he marched into the Forbidden Forest. Riddle made the decisions he did and didn't regret them. They had just been different decisions here.

Riddle listened the whole way through without interruptions. Harry was just getting ready to tell the story of his fourth year and how his visions had started linking him to Voldemort more and more when Riddle whispered, "I see now. I see some of the way that things could have changed. You saved Black with this time travel and your Patronus?"

Harry had to swallow back his grief. "Yes. Although—although he died anyway a few years ago."

Riddle just nodded. "Black died in the Dark Lord's third year," he said, and Harry had to admit it made his head spin when he realized Riddle was talking about _him_. Well, some version of Harry himself, anyway. He had to be very different for Harry to fit into this world in the first place, Dumbledore had said. "He seemed to be stalking the Dark Lord at first, and then he tried to kill him. There is no doubt of that. But we cannot know for certain why, as the Dark Lord killed him when he tried. I can only surmise that Black knew his best friend's son had become Dark, and he thought him better dead than corrupted."

Harry had no answer for that. There was just an enormous stone of sadness sitting in his chest. _It doesn't seem that Sirius has a good life in any world, _he thought dismally.

Riddle gestured for him to go on, and Harry shut his eyes and continued.

This time, the whole story of the Tournament, Voldemort's resurrection, and most of Harry's fifth year passed before Harry heard Riddle clear his throat. He opened his eyes, and saw Riddle leaning forwards with his hands clasped on the sides of his chair.

"Albus did not tell you the nature of the prophecy until you were almost _sixteen_?" Riddle asked.

Harry nodded. "He said," he muttered, when he realized Riddle was waiting for something more than that, "that he loved me, and wanted to give me a childhood. He _thought _about telling me earlier, but he couldn't bring himself to."

Riddle's eyes closed, and he sat there so wearily that Harry didn't dare question him. "Albus did not make those mistakes," Riddle whispered. "Not here. No, I was the one who made them."

Harry stared at him. Had the Harry Potter of _this _world been under a prophecy as well? But which one, when there was no Dark Lord to destroy until he became one?

Riddle made the pushing gesture again, and Harry continued. Much of sixth year he could skip over, he thought, except for the tales of Horcruxes and how they had led to Dumbledore's death and what Harry thought was the revelation of Snape's true allegiance. When he talked about that, a small, bitter smile lifted the corners of Riddle's lips.

"Would it surprise you to know," he whispered, "that our _own _Dark Lord probably would not have managed to kill Albus if not for the help of Severus Snape?"

"Well," Harry said, squirming in his chair, "he was different—different than I thought, at least. I learned that a—a day ago." It was incredible to realize that, at least in the time frame that he'd _felt _like had passed, he'd learned the truth about Snape less than twenty-four hours ago.

"He was different here," Riddle said. "Tell me the end."

Harry found that he didn't have as much to say about the last year as he had thought. There were the Horcruxes, of course, and the way they had destroyed the locket Horcrux, and the truth about Snape, and the Deathly Hallows. Harry had decided it was okay to mention that since Riddle had known what the Elder Wand was, anyway.

Riddle's face didn't change as Harry described the Resurrection Stone and the Invisibility Cloak and the way he had walked into the Forest to confront Voldemort after learning he was the last Horcrux. Then he leaned back and half-shook his head. "So many things were different," he said. "But I can see now, after what you told me of the memories that you witnessed, that the crucial thing which changed was Albus's decision about me."

Harry frowned at him. "He didn't treat you warily?"

Riddle half-laughed. "I think he wanted to. It's true that I did grow up in a Muggle orphanage, and I did take pleasure in my power over others. _That _was something he wanted to change about me, and never did succeed in changing." The look in his eyes made Harry want to rub his arms, but he kept still with an effort. "But he had the sense to realize that I was the most powerful student he had ever seen at Hogwarts, and that I could turn easily to the Dark if I didn't have proper guidance. Albus became my mentor. He showed me that the Light is more powerful than the Dark, and I followed him, becoming his student, then his Champion, then a professor in his school, and then his successor."

Harry blinked. "What's a Champion?"

"Someone who fights for an associate's honor," Riddle said. "Don't worry, I'll explain more later." Harry opened his mouth to argue, but Riddle was plowing on. "I recognized, because I was more Slytherin than Albus and Head of that House when the time came, that another young half-blood needed my guidance. I was able to train him, in time, to come to the same realization I had, about the Light, and that one could serve one's own self-interest and make oneself powerful without serving the Dark." Riddle grimaced. "Or so I thought."

"Look, that's the third time you've said something about that," Harry said. "But I just don't understand. Voldemort in my world thought the Dark was more powerful. You can torture people with Dark curses. What can you do with Light magic?"

Riddle smiled at Harry, almost tenderly. "I will need to have the training of you, too," he said. "Perhaps life would have been more pleasant around me if I had had it from the beginning." Harry started to open his mouth, because he'd thought that the student Riddle referred to instructing was the Harry who had turned into a Dark Lord, but Riddle overrode him again. "Think about this. What is light?"

Harry turned the question around in his mind for a second, then shrugged. "What comes from the sun and the moon and the stars."

Riddle nodded. "And when one understands the elemental forces of magic, then one can draw more power from the natural world through light than through darkness. Darkness is what comes to the world _because of _light, in cast shadows and in places where the light is not. It is not a force in and of itself. It is essentially a negative, not even an opposite." He flashed Harry what Harry thought was his notion of a smile. "My power increases every time the sun rises each morning. When I learned that I could bind myself to the sunlight and accomplish such a feat, then I became a Light wizard. It is true that my power only augments a tiny bit every day. But a wizard lives long. Imagine how strong I will be when I reach my hundredth birthday." His eyes blazed almost red.

"But light isn't—I mean, I never thought Light magic was _literal _light," Harry said, feeling dazed.

Riddle waved his hand. "That's because most people think that Light magic is the opposite of Dark magic, and nothing more. Just spells that don't hurt people, or spells that perform helpful magic, or rituals that have neutral purposes. That's granting darkness power instead of light, saying that _it _is the positive force. But Light magic is the magic of perception, of change, of transmutation. Because what is light but what allows us to see? And what is light but fire, that changes, that purifies, that scars, that transforms? I have many more fields open to me, many more kinds of spells that I can cast, than if I were to restrict myself to Dark Arts."

Harry blinked a little, dazed. He could see why Bill had called Riddle the Sunlord. Potentially, Riddle was stronger than Voldemort had been.

But he remembered something, and shook his head. "Dark magic must be powerful if this Dark Lord who replaced me can scare you all."

"I never said that Dark magic was not strong," Riddle said. "Simply that Light magic is stronger." He sighed. "Yes. When Harry Potter turned Dark, he brought innate strength of will and a magical core to some training and instruction in how Light magic worked. And he warped and twisted that Light magic, making the Dark a force in its own right, performing the opposite of the spells he had learned, in order to gain the most power."

"Where did he learn them?" Harry found himself whispering.

Riddle stared at him. "From his own mentor, another in the chain of power that led from Dumbledore to me," he said. "Someone who recognized his power, and set out to lead him down the right path—supposedly." He shook his head. "I should have realized _how _strong Potter was, and trained him myself, with the right application of pain, instead of feeling relieved that someone else had taken over the task. Or I should have burned out the magical core of the one who taught him when he was _my _pupil."

"Who was it?" Harry said, and his voice was still a whisper.

"The most powerful half-blood of _his _generation, whom I recognized, and taught, but not well enough," Riddle said. "Who in the end let his own hatred of Potter's parents and his attraction to Dark Arts and causing pain overcome even his draw to power. Severus Snape."


	3. The Dark Lord

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Three—The Dark Lord_

Harry opened his eyes into soft darkness, and frowned at the ceiling for a moment. He knew that Riddle had insisted he go to bed because he said that Harry was "overwhelmed" with all the new information, and he could apparently tell that from Harry's face. Harry wasn't sure how he felt about someone who could have been Voldemort deciding when he should shower and when he should sleep, but in truth, he was too tired to argue.

He knew he'd come into a guest bedroom that seemed to project off Riddle's quarters and fallen on the sheets, but he didn't know how he'd got from there to here, the darkness filled with a distant buzzing and the scent of smoke…

_Smoke._

Harry hurled himself from the bed to the floor, and crawled on hands and knees towards the door, ancient Muggle reminders about fire coming back to him. Then he remembered he was a wizard, too, and he _did _have a wand, even if that was the Elder Wand.

He held the wand straight above him and hissed, "_Ventus!_"

The air began to sway, then to stir, then to gust. A sharp breeze blew away the traces of the smoke that gathered above his head, and Harry stuck his head up and got a gasp of air. Then he cast a sphere of clear air around him and stood up, running to the door. For traces of a fire to have come this deep inside Hogwarts, into Riddle's private rooms, it must be powerful.

A hand clapped over his mouth as he came out of the room, and Harry twisted, throwing himself to the side and then forwards again, trying to get whoever it was off him. The person flowed and twisted with him, though, and then Riddle's voice said into Harry's ear, as harsh as the clatter of train wheels, "Do you want me to Stun you and carry you out of here? I will do that, rather than let you be a nuisance."

Heart pounding hard enough to make his head spin, Harry managed to hold still. No, he didn't want Riddle to Stun him. _That _height of indignity was the last thing he needed.

After one more warning pressure across his face, Riddle let him go. Harry turned to him and blinked. The _Lumos _charm on the end of Riddle's yew wand was the steadiest and strongest Harry had ever seen, nearly yellow. Well, Riddle had said that he got some of his power from sunlight.

"What happened?" Harry asked.

"An attack," Riddle said. He didn't turn his head towards Harry, but he sounded utterly clear and calm and collected, as though Harry's question fit in with whatever monologue was running in his head. "The same kind of attack that took down King's Cross Station, as per the reports of surviving witnesses. I find it strange that he would attack here, however. He's never dared come this close to Hogwarts's defenses before."

Harry frowned. "But why not? He knows the school, doesn't he? Since he grew up here?"

"It's changed quite a bit since he was last here, and even more since Dumbledore's death." Riddle took a long stride forwards. "It remains to be seen whether the attack is _exactly _the same as that which took down King's Cross Station, of course. That one started with flame, but ended with crushing force. Apparently Potter has learned to tame earthquake spells."

Harry started and cast a nervous glance at the stone over his head. He had no wish to be buried down here, if it started falling.

Riddle seemed to see or sense what he was doing, and waved an impatient hand at him. "This land is still warded," he said. "Wards the Founders came up with, which extend deep enough into the earth to calm fault lines, and mean no one can take advantage of them. And I am still more powerful than Potter."

Harry clutched his wand, seeing no reason to believe that. On the other hand, start doubting that and he would have to start doubting everything Riddle had said since Harry had come here, which would leave him without a reliable guide. Right now, it made more sense to relax.

"If he is using fire, he will be sorry," Riddle breathed, and closed his eyes and began to chant, sending a spell spilling out in front of him, if the faint, silvery-colored thread was any indication. Harry watched it in silence, checking Riddle's level of concentration now and then. When Riddle opened his eyes again, Harry thought he could ask.

"Why? You said that he used it on King's Cross Station, and he managed to destroy everyone and everything there."

"Not everyone," Riddle said calmly. "There were witnesses. And he _is _using fire. He could use it with impunity in his last attack, because I did not hear of it in time to get there." He turned his head and smiled at Harry, and Harry took a step back from that smile and the red glow that had once again invaded Riddle's eyes.

"Fire," Riddle whispered, as if speaking another incantation, "is the servant of the Light." He lifted his wand in an unhurried gesture that made Harry wince again. "_Cor ignis!_"

The air around him turned red, and smelled of heat, which, as Harry knew, was a different kind of smell from smoke. When he looked, Riddle was crowned with flames, dancing and swaying on his head and shoulders, bending as though before a strong wind. There was also a fire blazing on the hearth, which Harry couldn't remember seeing before.

Riddle raised his head and took a deep breath, as though he was a dragon. From down the corridor beyond his room came a loud whistle, and Riddle gestured with a lazy hand, opening the door to his room an instant before the fire would have torn it down.

Harry shrieked in spite of himself as a wall of flames raced into the room. He fell back, reinforcing his sphere of clean air, and so had a clear line of sight to see Riddle reach out and welcome the soaring fire like a lover.

It swept around his shoulders, curling and coiling, until Harry expected to hear Riddle speak to it in Parseltongue. Instead, Riddle let his hand sweep about it, caressing, and called up fire from the hearth, too, until he was surrounded by a constantly moving wheel of form and color. He had his eyes closed, his hands cupped, and Harry could make out definite shapes springing up from his palms and wrapping around his head, but they all collapsed and wavered and vanished in the next few seconds, as the fire altered itself.

"Why did he use it if he knew that you could do this?" Harry whispered.

Riddle opened his eyes and turned his head. No smile was on his lips, but the reflection of the fire in his eyes made it look like there was. "Because fire is still powerful magic," he said. "And most wizards don't have the commitment to the Light that is necessary in order to control it like this."

He spread his hands, and the fire dripped down like oil, forming, at his feet, the braided serpents that Harry had expected to see at first. "Now," Riddle added softly, "we shall turn it back on him."

He took a breath deep enough that Harry winced a little and touched his own chest to make sure he had enough air. Then Riddle swept his arm out in front of him and said, most likely in Parseltongue given the way the flame serpents leaped up, "Seek my enemy and turn him inside out."

The serpents sped into the air, leaping like fire from stone to stone, and out of the door that led from Riddle's quarters and down the tunnel. Riddle laughed and followed them, his stride utterly relaxed and swinging out in front of him as though he had miles to go instead of only a few thousand feet.

Harry followed him. "They won't _really _turn him inside out, will they?" he asked, when he was close enough to Riddle to ask the question. Although, he thought, he could have whispered instead of shouted. The tunnel had gone utterly still, quiet, because Riddle had sucked in all the fire and then let it go again without letting it rage the way it had before.

"They'll try," Riddle said, waving one hand as he stepped around the final corner into the Great Hall. "They won't succeed. But they'll give him something else to contend against, and unlike you, he has no gift of Parseltongue." He cast Harry a sharp look.

"I _did _tell you how that happened," Harry protested, but ended up mumbling it, because the Great Hall was already full of the other members of the Light Resistance, and he didn't know how much he wanted them to overhear.

_Then why are you trusting _Tom Riddle, _of all people? _

Because he knew the most, Harry had to admit. And he was the one who might be able to teach Harry the most about this world and surviving the war.

And because he was the only one Harry thought would kill Harry if he lied. That had a big part to play in it, too.

"Sunlord!" That was Percy, his necklace of colored stones flashing as he leaned forwards. "What's your battle plan?"

Riddle drew his wand and swept it up and down. Traces of light followed it, and made a map of Hogwarts—this changed Hogwarts, Harry corrected himself—in the air. The light turned green for the Forbidden Forest and black for the castle's stone and dark for the moat in the appropriate places. The map was three-dimensional and spun to show different areas when Riddle gave slashes of his wand.

Harry blinked. _Maybe Light magic really is more powerful than Dark magic. _At least, he knew no Dark spell that could have done this.

"The Dark Lord is attacking directly, but not yet here, which means he must be beyond the wards," Riddle declared calmly. "Draco, I want you to take the east end. Your former father is most likely to be there."

Draco nodded, his eyes blank but his mouth curving up in a small smile that looked involuntary. Harry found himself shivering and looking away.

"Hermione, take the path to Hogsmeade," Riddle said, gesturing and making the picture of Hogwarts spin around so dizzily that Harry was concerned he might throw up for a second. "You are the best at defending open spaces, and that's the most open space left on the grounds, which means the majority of the Dark Lord's troops will come from that direction."

"Yes, sir," Hermione said, straightening up and flipping off a little salute. Harry looked at her, wondering if there was a reason that she didn't call Riddle "Sunlord" the way that all the rest of them did, but Hermione had her face turned away as she spoke softly to Ron, and Harry couldn't see her expression.

Riddle placed all the others around the castle, some on the towers, some on the ground or around the moat, with calm, vicious gestures. Then he paused and looked at Harry, his smile sliding into something sharp that made Harry wince.

"I think Mr. Potter should come with me," Riddle said softly, ignoring the way that most of the people around him flinched at the last name. Harry shifted uneasily. It was going to take him a long time to accept that, for people in this world, _his _name had the same effect that "Voldemort" did in his own. "He has the gift of commanding snakes, and a powerful wand. He will be useful when it comes to stirring up the people of the Forest."

"I can only talk to snakes," Harry said, firming his grip on the Elder Wand just in case Riddle tried to duel him and take it away from him. "Not unicorns or anything."

"You think unicorns still live so near to the center of conflict?" Riddle laughed softly. "No, they have long since fled to warmer climes. You will see how you can be useful when we get to the Forest."

And he turned away and ignored Harry as utterly as though he wasn't standing there, catching the eyes of the other members of the Light Resistance. Harry saw more than one of them stand up and inflate their chests. Harry decided not to stick a finger down his throat, but he really wanted to. What had Riddle _done _to inspire them all?

Then he paused, remembering what Riddle had told him last night, about being Dumbledore's student and Champion and associate. If there had been someone close to Dumbledore who could have taken over in Harry's world when he fell, wouldn't Harry have respected and listened to him, too? McGonagall wasn't really the same.

_I have to remember that _this _one isn't Voldemort. He doesn't have the same reasons to hate me._

Then Harry caught the sideways glance from Riddle, how Riddle had his head tucked down and his smile slyly beaming, and had to keep from shaking his head.

_He's not the same, but fuck if I'm trusting him._

* * *

"How can you call yourself a Light wizard if you're a Parselmouth?"

Riddle sighed ahead of Harry, and turned sideways to negotiate a narrow path between two trees. He had yet to glance back at Harry or act as though Harry was anything more than a nuisance fastened at his heels, and Harry had to admit that he could feel the churning desire in him to do _something _to impress Riddle, wave the Elder Wand around or demonstrate his talent for flying and make Riddle respect him.

_That's probably the reason he gets people to follow him, _Harry decided, and felt wise with it.

"I wish that you would give up your insular prejudices," Riddle said, finally glancing at Harry over his shoulder. "Albus harbored such ideas—fifty years ago. He gave them up when he realized my power, and that he wanted to train me and convert me to his side. Parseltongue is no more a Dark gift on its own than the ability to conjure a fire on a hearth is a Light one."

"But Dark wizards use Parseltongue," Harry said.

Riddle sniffed. "Of course they do. It is potentially powerful magic. But my research into the life of Slytherin himself indicates that he understood better, at least at first. It was a gift to use, and he intended to use his basilisk to guard the school." Riddle shook his head. "Later, he became convinced that he had to guide and direct the future, and that meant either identifying wizards as powerful as he was and ruling over them, or eliminating them. The basilisk was meant to keep an eye on pure-bloods _and _Muggleborns, and kill anyone who exhibited comparable power to Slytherin himself."

"That's crazy," Harry said, a little awed. Just getting kicked out of Hogwarts, the way Slytherin had in his world, started to look common.

"That's what Dark Arts will do to you unless you remember that you still have to do something other than torture people," Riddle said. "The current Dark Lord does not have to do anything else, so it works for him." He paused, looking ahead, and started to hold up his hand.

Harry took a deep breath. "How were his parents killed?" he asked.

Riddle didn't turn, but Harry thought he saw his shoulders stiffen. "The current Dark Lord?" he asked.

Harry rolled his eyes. "No, yours," he snapped.

"My father died of fear," Riddle said. "My mother of sickness contracted during childbirth."

Harry bit the inside of his cheek so he wouldn't scream. Riddle was all the more infuriating when he acted as though Harry's questions were serious and he wouldn't answer them. "Fine," he said. "I meant it differently. I meant _his_."

"In a werewolf attack," Riddle said. "Be quiet now. Or make sure that the words you speak are not in English." And he hissed.

Harry heard the hiss for only a few seconds before his mind began to translate the Parseltongue. _Come forth, children of the fire._

Harry winced a little as he thought about that. He only knew one snake who could really be called a child of fire, and if it was here…

It was, he saw a moment later, as Ashwinders began to come out of the bushes around them, flickering their tongues at Riddle. Harry saw that each of them had a portable ball of fire behind them, which floated and flickered at the back of their heads. Harry stared at Riddle, who smiled slightly back at him and faced the Ashwinders again. He had to have been the one who created the fire, Harry thought. Without it, the Ashwinders would only have lived an hour.

"Greetings," Riddle said, sounding as though he didn't particularly have any reason to come here except to call out the Ashwinders and chat with them. "Your lair is under attack. I wish you to come forth and burn the ones responsible."

Harry stared around the Forest. He wondered if the whole thing was a lair for Ashwinders now. Or maybe there were Runespoors and other magical snakes here, too. Riddle had probably stocked the Forest with serpents so that he could use it as a defense only he could command.

_No wonder the unicorns didn't stay, _Harry thought, and suppressed a hysterical giggle.

He saw that Riddle had turned towards him, and swallowed his nervousness, glaring back. "What?" he demanded, not knowing if it came out in English or Parseltongue.

Riddle gestured, and Ashwinders twined around Harry's legs and slithered up to his shoulders. Harry started. He hadn't realized that they had come so close. "You've volunteered to be in the vanguard."

"Oh, I have, have I?" Something of Harry's unimpressed tone must have carried through into the Parseltongue, because all the Ashwinders laughed around him, the sound gentle and sounding like the rustling of burnt leaves.

"Yes," Riddle said. "You have. I want you to go north through the Forbidden Forest and attack the contingent where I think the Dark Lord himself is. I will come behind with the Runespoors and Firebrand."

Harry decided not to ask what Firebrand was, in case it turned out to be Riddle's pet basilisk. "You have a really nice opinion of my strength, if you think I'll survive going up against the Dark Lord himself," he mumbled.

"Ah, but you have already defeated one, have you not?" Riddle's eyes were alight with amusement. "And I require that you have your wand burning in order to illuminate your face more effectively. I want him stunned and dismayed. I want him to recognize you."

"So I'm going to end up dying in another world for a war that's really none of my business," Harry said.

"Your version of Albus sent you here with the promise that this world could be a home, did he not?" Riddle paused to watch Harry with a piercing gaze, ignoring the shrieks and clash of battle that Harry could hear now beyond the trees. "What kind of dweller in our world will you make, if you will not even fight for your home?"

Harry scowled. "I hate you sometimes."

"Not _all _the time? That is already an improvement." Riddle turned and slipped further into the Forest, between the trunks of two huge trees that Harry thought were oaks, calling in a low voice. Harry saw another flicker of flame. Maybe Firebrand was Riddle's giant Ashwinder that he rode to battle on.

Harry glanced at the Ashwinders clustered around him and shook his head a little. It seemed that he wasn't going to get out of this, so he might as well go with it and hope that it would earn him some goodwill from the members of the Light Resistance. If they didn't accept him, they might at least tell him where other people were who might, like Remus.

"Come on," he told the snakes, and walked away with them coiling and sliding through the leaves and shadows behind him, lit and sustained by their balls of fire.

* * *

The Dark Lord was in the middle of a whole bunch of troops, most of them wearing thick green cloaks with silver masks. Harry snorted. It seemed it was universal for Dark Lords to decide that that was the kind of thing their underlings should wear. Although Voldemort had at least gone for black and white instead of the Slytherin House colors.

Harry held his Ashwinders back for a second, partially because he wanted to watch the progress of the battle and partially because he was curious. Everyone was telling him that Dark Lord _was _him, but Harry hadn't seen a trace of it so far. He wondered exactly how much this boy resembled him. There must be other differences besides the lack of a scar.

He'd located the central figure without much difficulty, but seeing his face was harder. The night was broken by lightning from the east, the glow of Hogwarts's wards as they held up to the bombardment from this Harry's troops, and the blaze of various light spells, plus the fire coming from behind Harry. None of it made it that easy to see and focus on one object.

But finally someone who loomed over the other one and might have been Walden Macnair bent down to say something to him, and the Dark Lord turned his head.

Harry caught his breath. He didn't wear a mask, the way Harry had been afraid he would. His face was stern and pale, and his eyes an incredibly odd color, like emeralds starting out of his head. People had told Harry _his _eyes were like that, but he could look into any mirror and see that that wasn't true. This was weird, and creepy.

He had dark hair, or at least Harry thought he could see it clustering around the edges of his cloak's hood. The hair might have been straight or curly, as wild as Harry's or flatter. It was hard to tell at this distance.

The Ashwinders hissed impatiently around Harry, and as much because it might cause this Dark Lord to turn towards him and give him a better view than anything else, Harry flung up his arms and let them go. The Ashwinders slithered out and attacked the Dark wizards without hesitation, their mouths open and their flames flowing around them.

Suddenly the wizards who were helping or advising or taking orders from or protecting their Dark Lord—Harry had no idea which—had something else to deal with. They spun to face the new distraction, and there were regular shouts and shrieks from multiple throats. Harry grinned. He supposed that no one else was a Parselmouth in this group, either.

The Dark Lord immediately took a step forwards and aimed his face and wand at the woods as if expecting Riddle to come out. Harry charged him instead, brandishing the Elder Wand.

For a second, he caught a better glimpse of the Dark Lord than he had so far. His eyes really _did _stand out a few inches beyond their sockets, and his dark hair trailed on the ground, it was so long. Or if it wasn't hair, Harry had to control queasiness at the sight of the dark tendrils that emerged from under his robe. He supposed it _could _be tentacles, depending on the way that this Dark Lord had changed himself.

Then the other Harry ducked down, and a blast of concentrated and rolling power came out of him and crashed into Harry.

Harry bent down and gasped aloud. It had felt like a punch in the stomach, a _slimy _punch in the stomach. And something flailed and grasped through his head, the way that Snape's Legilimency had. Harry wouldn't be surprised if this Dark Lord was a Legilimens, but he hadn't known you could read someone's mind and punch them in the stomach at the same time.

He rolled away instinctively from the spell that followed it, which he didn't think had come from the Dark Lord but from one of the wizards surrounding him. His stomach still hurt, but he could breathe again.

And Harry thought it was time to mix things up, to show them he was someone other than just a helpless victim.

He aimed his wand straight at the two Dark wizards who were striding towards him, or rather at the bottom of their dark green robes, and shouted, "_Incendio!_"

There was a rush of power that felt like an indrawn breath, and then fire as great as the balls that surrounded the Ashwinders sprang up from the cloth. Harry saw a wizard's hair catch on fire, and he began to run around in circles, shrieking and clawing at it. Then he flung himself on the ground and rolled, but the flames didn't go out. They followed him like living beings instead, wrapped around his ribs, sinking in sharp and literal claws.

Harry stared, wondering if he had somehow cast Fiendfyre without meaning to. But he was sure of his incantation, and he didn't understand what would somehow make it different.

Then he felt the thrum inside his fist, and did understand , after all. The Elder Wand had increased the power of the spell. It couldn't actually make Harry cast Dark magic, but it could make his simple spells as destructive as it could.

Harry grimaced and got his feet beneath him, putting his back to a tree. Then he cast Shield Charms on either side of him, so that he would be able to keep anyone from approaching him from the sides.

The Dark Lord took a step towards him. He shied away from his followers who were rolling around in the fire, but never seemed to pay attention to them otherwise. His gaze was locked on Harry's face, rapt. Harry braced himself for a duel he wasn't sure if he could win.

Then Riddle arrived, a rush of Runespoors coiling past him and giving the Dark Lord's followers something else to think about.

And diving from above came Riddle's Firebrand, who turned out to be a phoenix.

Harry ducked despite himself when a tail full of flames whistled over his head, and then shook his head and stood up taller. The Dark Lord was staring at the phoenix as if it was his worst nightmare, and a second later he raised his wand and began to chant. Harry shivered as the temperature dropped all around him, and cold plumes of black water rose from the ground near the Dark Lord, reaching out to splash on the phoenix and quench the fires.

A phoenix couldn't be extinguished that easily, as anyone should have known. But then, Harry wasn't sure that this other self was sane anymore; Riddle hadn't talked much about that. Firebrand rose again, singing, and the song cut through the dark. Harry found he could breathe more easily. The flash and clap of light and Light magic from all over the grounds seemed to pick up speed as that song inspired the others, too.

The guards around the Dark Lord were having trouble doing anything but fighting the Runespoors and Ashwinders right now. Riddle was burning people alive off to the side. Harry did his best to ignore that and took a step towards the Dark Lord. He wondered if there was anything he could do to make things different, if seeing someone who looked so much like him would change the boy's mind somehow.

Then the Dark Lord turned and stared at him.

And Harry found himself rooted in place, shivering, as something like a black blade pierced past his eyes and into his mind. The blade flicked aside memories. Harry saw glimpses of Voldemort's face, the Elder Wand, the symbol of the Deathly Hallows, the basilisk, and that time in second year when Draco Malfoy had cast the _Serpensortia _spell and Harry had revealed to everyone that he could speak Parseltongue.

The memories towered. Harry was standing on a wooden floor and staring at the pendant Luna's father wore with the symbol of the Deathly Hallows and facing Voldemort and feeling the pain of the basilisk fang pierce his arm all at once. He drew breath to scream, not sure what would happen when he did, not sure what was happening to him now, except that he was trapped in his memories and couldn't find the way out.

He remembered, from last night, a snatch of Riddle's conversation, about how Light magic manipulated perceptions and transformations and thoughts. Then what was this? Or was this one of the ways the Dark Lord here, taught by Snape, had learned how to twist and warp Light magic into Dark?

The memories whirled around him, going so fast that Harry fell to his knees and found himself foolishly clutching at the forest floor, the grass and earth. Cold water crashed over his body, although he didn't know what was real and what wasn't. But then, that was true of everything around him now. He had no idea which way was down and which was up, and while he knew that this had begun when he looked into the Dark Lord's eyes, he didn't know if he was still looking into them.

A thin sound descended into his ears. The thought of sound and ears and descent oriented Harry more to the world around him than anything had in what felt like years. He tossed his head back, taking a deep breath, and his hair brushed and wriggled against his ears, sopping wet.

He opened his eyes and looked up, and although the memories still crouched around him like beasts and the sensation of kneeling in cold water still welled along his limbs, above him was Firebrand, and the sight of a phoenix was _real_.

The way it had been in the Chamber, Harry thought. The way Fawkes had been when fighting the basilisk. That had been another world, another place. It had been one of the memories that the Dark Lord had called upon to disarm him.

But it was still _his _memory. And that meant it wasn't the bastard's to take.

Harry heaved himself to his feet and stretched his arm up. The invitation was instinctive, and for a long second he thought Firebrand wouldn't accept it. He was Riddle's phoenix, after all, and there was no saying that he answered to anyone else.

But then Firebrand settled on Harry's arm, as heavy as a hawk, or what he imagined a hawk would feel like, shaking his bright tail back and forth and singing steadily, indignantly. Harry felt the warmth pour into him, warmth of flame and warmth of song, and turned to face the Dark Lord, lifting the phoenix.

Firebrand flew off Harry like a hawk, too, aiming straight at the other Dark Lord as if hunting prey. The Dark Lord stood his ground, and his wand moved to the side, up, down, around, in a pattern of a cross inside a circle.

Firebrand screamed as the air around him turned dark and strangling, to cold water. The attack this time was more personal, and Harry saw Firebrand's flames begin to dim and go out, the way they couldn't when he was flying above those streamers. He dropped to the ground, a small bird and not a raptor after all, writhing and shrieking and batting chicken-like claws against the dark.

Harry didn't want that to happen, either. This wasn't Fawkes, but he reminded Harry of him, and this stranger with the empty eyes on the other side of the battlefield didn't remind Harry of himself. Not _at all._

He charged, yelling, and the Dark Lord's attention snapped to him. The dark streamers attacking Firebrand let up a little. The Dark Lord's wand rose again, and some of the people who had spread out to fight the snakes tried to close back in around him, to protect him.

Harry was beyond them already, fast, with the speed he'd picked up running from Dudley and his friends, and then from Death Eaters. He danced past the clutching arms of one follower, leaped another's, and crashed into the Dark Lord, bearing him to the earth.

The impact was enough to make the Dark Lord almost lose his wand. Harry found himself struggling against a body the same size as his own, wiry arms that rose and flailed against him, and legs of the same size that kicked.

A hand caught him on the ear and made it ring, and Harry ducked his head to keep from staring, remembering what had happened the last time he met the Dark Lord's eyes. Then he put the Elder Wand in the center of one wrist and shouted, "_Expelliarmus!_"

The blast caught the Dark Lord's wand and almost _shot _it out of his hand, so that it soared across the grass in front of them and landed somewhere in one of the shadows that the flickering lights made. The Dark Lord shrieked like the Hogwarts Express. That must have been a signal that Harry didn't understand, because various Dark wizards who'd surrounded him scattered to look for the wand.

Harry grabbed the punching hands of this person who was so much like him, so much his own size, and rolled, hard. Now he was on the bottom, and he was worried for a second that the Dark Lord would seize him and slam his head into the ground, but Harry's grip on his wrists was still too tight. He kept jerking his head up and trying to stare Harry in the eyes, anyway.

_Is he too far gone to think of any other weapon that he can use? _Harry wanted to sniff in contempt, but refrained. _I would be better than this if I were going to turn Dark._

Then he twisted again, and managed to accomplish what he wanted, ending up kneeling on the Dark Lord's back with the bastard trapped beneath him, his wrists clasped together in the middle of his back and in Harry's tight grip. Harry laid his wand against his throat and looked up. There was someone with a green robe and silver mask only a few feet from him, but he halted in between one step and another when he saw Harry looking at him.

Harry narrowed his eyes. "If you try to attack me, then I'll just kill him," he said, striving for the casual, flat tone that he thought Riddle would probably use right now. "And wouldn't that be a poor end to all his striving?"

The Dark Lord tried to stir under Harry. Harry ducked his head down and hissed into the git's ear, "If you're not too far gone from sanity, then you know I mean it. _Shut up _and stay still. Don't try to command them, or control my mind, or anything."

The Dark Lord went still, but then Harry felt a strange lassitude invade the prat's arms where he was holding them. The skin there was prickling when he looked down, changing and becoming darker. Ripples of brown and grey and black spread out from them, and before Harry could convince himself they were probably only illusions and wouldn't hurt him, he jerked his hands back.

The Dark Lord gave a hollow laugh that wasn't worse than Voldemort's but was still something that Harry would never have wanted to hear come out of a mouth so like his own, and rolled his head back to look up at Harry. His lips had parted, and Harry could see dark, jagged teeth behind them. Some seemed to be broken and cracked, other pointed up like fangs, and he thought that he would probably cut his fingers on them if he reached in there.

Not that he _wanted _to reach in there at all. He jerked his hands back from that temptation, too, especially when the Dark Lord lunged up and tried to bite him. His teeth made a clicking, rattling sound like dice when he snapped them back together.

Riddle's voice said casually from behind Harry, "Down."

Harry dropped flat, even though that meant partially dropping down on top of the Dark Lord. Flames singed the hair on his neck, and a sweet, strong music burst into his ears. The Dark Lord beneath him screamed like a wounded teakettle and started flailing around, almost kicking Harry in the ear. Harry kicked back and cast a spell with the Elder Wand. He wasn't even sure which one it was, but it lifted him up and floated him away to a safe distance, and that was the only thing he cared about for right now.

He glanced up, panting, to see Riddle standing at the edge of the Forbidden Forest, his hands extended and his arms held up as though they were pistons on which the world turned. Firebrand hovered halfway between him and the Dark Lord lying on the ground, his wings spread as if in imitation of Riddle's arms, but curved more in a scythe or scimitar shape. He hadn't stopped singing.

Riddle said something that was liquid and sliding, and Harry thought it might be in the language of birds, rather than Parseltongue, because _Harry _certainly didn't understand it. The Dark Lord shrieked.

He got up on his feet in the next instant, and extended his own hands. His wand soared back into them, and Harry watched him spin around so it was pointing like a compass needle at Riddle's heart.

Riddle didn't notice, or maybe didn't deign to notice. His head continued to be tilted back, his breathing came calm and steady, and his hands wove around in front of him as though he was conducting an orchestra. Firebrand landed on his shoulder, fluffed his tail out in a scarlet blaze of glory that made Harry blink, and continued to sing. The Dark Lord took a menacing step towards them that neither noticed, either.

Harry didn't recognize the spell that the Dark Lord spoke. Maybe it was one of the warped Light spells that Riddle had talked about. But the effect was immediate.

Grey mist descended all over the battlefield. Harry huddled down, shivering. He could feel beads of dew gathering along the back of his neck, and there were sharp prickles up and down, under his skin, that made him want to scratch it clean _off. _The weight on his mind that was his rage and despair that he couldn't return home grew heavier, until it was hard to breathe and iron bands constricted his heart from beating.

He could still hear Firebrand's song, but it was so distant and meaningless that Harry couldn't look up or orient on it.

He finally glanced up, and saw something standing in front of him. At first he thought it was a Dementor, but it had a faint glow like tarnished silver that he had never seen any Dementor exude; they were pure Dark. The creature had the outline of a horse, maybe, or a stag. Now and then Harry thought he saw antlers on its head. Now and then, they were horns. Now and then, they were a single long, black, spiral horn pointed straight at his heart, as though the creature was a reverse unicorn.

_No, _Harry slowly understood, as the flow of despair seeped into his heart and the creature bent its head closer and closer to him. _A reverse Patronus._

The creature moved slowly towards Harry, so slowly that he had time to hear every separate hoofbeat. It breathed at him, and Harry _felt _his sight dim, some of the joy and life that made him himself flowing out of his soul and into this thing. His heart beat more slowly. He lifted a hand and tried to shield his eyes, and it looked like grey glass.

The reverse Patronus took another step. Harry was lying flat now; he couldn't remember how that had happened. A cold muzzle snuffled at his neck, and he felt the creature _breathing _him down, sipping him. Harry's soul sloshed, rippled, drained. His memories whirled around him and fled. He knew where he was, but not who he was; then he could feel even that bit of knowledge narrowing to a pinpoint, getting ready to vanish.

Someone said, voice so distant that it was as unimportant as the phoenix's song, "_Lux aeterna._"

There was a wild rush and glow of light, and then the reverse Patronus screamed and danced back. Harry shot to his feet. He knew who he was now, and where he was, and what the thing sniffling at him had been, and he was past both. He held out his hands and shouted, furiously and defiantly and hopefully, and more memories came back, and he knew his Ron and Hermione again—not the ones here, but they still lived somewhere—and he grabbed the Elder Wand and rushed forwards into battle.

The reverse Patronus backed away from him, shivering violently, stamping a foot, and confined to one form now, a stag with crumbling black antlers made of ash and haunted eyes. It flung its head up when Harry stared at it, and then turned and stampeded in the other direction, tail up and body breaking into mist as it bounded between the trees. The light singing through Harry wove itself around in front of him, and he recognized it as Firebrand.

Beside him, though, hovered another transparent, shining thing. Not a phoenix, Harry thought, but the light from the spell that Riddle had cast, come into being to save him. And anyone else on the battlefield, but he had the feeling that Riddle had cast the spell mostly for him.

The shining light and Firebrand sped away, weaving and twining through the forest, singing together, and setting Dark wizards casually on fire. Harry looked for the Dark Lord, but couldn't see him. He saw a triumphant, seething mass of Ashwinders instead, and Runespoors behind them, and Riddle standing with his hands out at his sides, lips moving as he chanted. Harry didn't see his wand, but he had no doubt that magic was happening anyway. He could feel his mood lightening, and hear the victorious shouts from a short distance off, as Riddle's Light Resistance fought its way back to their feet.

There was a long silence as Riddle finished, and magic seemed to flow and collapse back into the earth. Riddle opened his eyes and shook his head, rubbing at his ears.

"That sort of power makes my ears pop," he explained, when he saw Harry looking at him. "A minor weakness that I hoped was temporary when I first began to experience the heights of Light magic. Alas."

"Thank you," Harry said, finding his voice as cold and awkward as the reverse Patronus in retreat. "You saved my life."

Riddle raised his eyebrows as he regarded him. "Saved your life?" he asked softly. "Rather, saved _you_. The reverse Patronus would have taken you, body and mind and soul and magic, until nothing was left."

Harry swallowed. "So that's what you meant by warping Light spells," he whispered.

Riddle shrugged a little. "Yes, that was what I meant."

Harry nodded again. "Well. Thank you for saving me, then." He looked around. "What happened to him? I didn't see him fleeing, but he isn't here anymore."

Riddle sighed and half-shut his eyes. "Your ridiculous obsession with the obvious will cost me in time and patience," he murmured, and pointedly ignored the way Harry blushed. "He departed when my spell began to disrupt his Patronus. He had invested too much of his time and effort in that one spell, and he neglected to guard against my influence over his soldiers with the Light magic I wield." He looked thoughtfully in what Harry supposed was the direction that the Dark Lord had taken, although it was hard to tell, with darkness settling back over the fields and the _Lumos _Charms on their wands only lighting up a small area. "But one theory is confirmed. I must thank you for serving as the distraction while I tested it."

"Distraction?" Harry knew his voice was rising, and some of the people drifting up behind Riddle looked at him warily, but he couldn't care, not when it seemed that Riddle had arranged the whole battle to use Harry as bait. "What do you _mean_?"

"I _mean_," Riddle said, imitating Harry's inflection with a force that made Harry flush painfully, "that I wondered how strong his inclination towards Dark magic was. There are some wizards who use it but feel no discomfort in the presence of sun-based spells. Others might feel some but be able to conceal it, and still others, who twist Light spells, flinch from the real thing."

"What category is he in?" Harry asked, feeling a little dizzy with the way they were jumping subjects. He wondered if Riddle ever got tired, or if he lay awake at night arguing subjects with himself so that his mind would have something to do.

"He is so far gone that he fled rather than face the Eternal Light," Riddle said, and his voice was soft and his eyes had a glint in them that Harry didn't understand. "And despite its name, it is not a very strong spell. It is meant mainly to defeat Dark creatures, like his Patronus, that venture too close to human habitation. That he ran…" Riddle shut his eyes and tilted his head back. "Interesting. Very interesting."

He turned and eyed Harry for a moment. "Minor burns, a few patches of frostbite, and some psychic shock from facing his Patronus close up," Riddle murmured. "You'll be fine with a short visit to Mrs. Tonks, but make sure that you get some sleep."

"Mrs. Tonks?" Harry echoed, a bit bewildered, although of course he had seen Andromeda among the Light Resistance last night.

"She's our Healer. I'll see you tomorrow, and give you some more explanations in return for your help." Riddle turned and began to walk towards the other members of his Light Resistance, clapping his hands and calling for their attention.

Harry opened his mouth to _demand _explanations. He had risked his life in the war. Why couldn't he have them now, when he wanted them?

But Andromeda was right there before he could voice the questions, her wand flicking in circles and her mouth thinning as she checked the red and blue lights that her spell bore. She shook her head.

"He's always thinking that his ability to resist the Dark is shared by the rest of us," she told Harry. "And that someone who hasn't faced it before can rebound more quickly than is the case. Here." She dug into her pocket and produced a shimmering silvery potion that she held out to Harry. "Drink this. It's for the frostbite," she added, maybe seeing the distrust Harry couldn't prevent in his eyes.

Harry wavered, then decided that he felt bloody awful and wanted to sleep for a while. He didn't really think the potion would have any worse effect.

Sure enough, all it did was pour blackness down his throat and into his mind, and his body relaxed in a wonderful, collapsing way. How he got off the battlefield, Harry never knew.

* * *

"…And I don't think it's wise to trust someone from another world that much."

Harry awoke, still shivering a little, in the same bed where he had gone to sleep, in the guest room off Riddle's quarters. He wrapped his arms around himself to still the shivering, shifted to the side, and then listened intently. It would be just like Riddle to have left some ward or charm that would alert him when Harry moved.

Nothing buzzed or hissed or rang, though a faint humming sound _did _come from the side. Harry looked up, and stared. On a perch broader and taller than the one that Fawkes had used in Dumbledore's office rested Firebrand, close to the door to the bathroom. His tail spread around him, his eyes were closed, and his head was tucked into his breast feathers. He appeared to be humming in his sleep.

Harry wondered if Firebrand had been left as a guard on him, but if so, he was a singularly ineffective one. All he did when Harry got out of bed was open one bright eye, glance at him, and then tuck his head down even more efficiently, burying his beak in feathers until Harry was surprised he could breathe.

"I _don't _think it's wise!"

The voice turned Harry's attention back to the conversation happening outside the room, and the necessity of either demanding to know what it was about or getting as close as he could without them overhearing him. He slipped out of bed—relieved that he was still dressed—and crept across the room, to the partially open door.

Through it, he could see a closer group of chairs than the ones in front of the fireplace, plus some extra ones he thought had been conjured for the Resistance. Andromeda, Hermione, Ron, and Neville were in the ones that flanked the central chair, Riddle's. Riddle leaned with his elbows resting on the back of the chair, the same way he'd sat when conversing with Harry the other night, and the same easy smile on his face.

One chair faced his, empty. Pacing back and forth in front of Riddle was the occupant, Malfoy—Black, Harry corrected himself—his voice raised.

_I suppose it's nice to know that wherever I go, Malfoy will distrust me, _Harry thought sardonically.

"If he is from another world," Riddle said, his voice pleasant and almost sweet after the way Draco had brayed, "then there is all the more reason to trust him. He cannot be on the Dark Lord's side. He came to us first, and he fought with us in this battle. I don't know why you think that should turn him against us, or encourage him to spy for the Dark Lord."

"Because he and the Dark Lord _are the same person_." Draco spun around on one heel as though he was making an important point. Harry studied the way his hair flopped around his face and suppressed a snort. He knew that Draco had been through a lot more in this world, but he still had a lot of the same pomposity. "Of course they would share the same goals."

Riddle sighed. "Then you must think that I am lying about him being from a different world. Or he is. If they are from different lives, why would they be the same?"

Draco shook his head. "They look the same. They had the same parents. That must have influenced them in a lot of the same ways."

Riddle's smile was small and vicious. "Ah, yes. I had forgotten that once parents stamp their image on someone, nothing can alter it."

Draco fell back a step and clapped a hand to his mouth before he became aware of what he was doing and dropped it. Riddle watched with a simmer of pleasure on his face, darting back and forth between his eyes and his mouth. Harry shivered involuntarily. _He might be Light in this universe, but he still likes toying with people._

"Nothing further to say," Draco said, in a voice that sounded played out, and dropped into the chair that faced Riddle again.

Riddle glanced around his Light Resistance again, as though waiting for more objections, and then held his finger up the way he would if he was conducting an orchestra. Harry thought he didn't imagine the way everyone promptly focused and centered on Riddle. Hell, it was hard to avoid doing it himself.

"Good," Riddle said. "Now. The battle confirmed what I had suspected, that the Dark Lord is curious indeed about Harry." Andromeda shifted as though she didn't like the first-name address Riddle had given Harry, but Riddle looked at her again, and she was still. "We can use Harry to tempt him closer than I had been able to so far. At the same time, the final battle I am imagining cannot take place at Hogwarts. Tonight confirmed that too. All of the Dark Lord's attachment for the school is gone, and he has people on his side who know our wards and defenses too well. That means we must take it away."

There was silence. Harry wondered what implications the members of the Light Resistance were working through, the implications that were invisible to him.

And when Riddle might have been going to tell _him _about them.

Andromeda was the first to say, "No. You cannot do it." She sat up to face Riddle, and her face was grim and determined in a way that Harry had never seen it in his world. "You cannot—there is no reason for you to do that. You know how much damage it has caused in the past. You _cannot _awaken it."

"It caused damage to Muggle lives," Riddle corrected her softly. "Muggle property. It will not do so this time. It will awake to _my _command, and the damage will be localized." His smile made Harry want to throw up. "To one specific person, as a matter of fact."

"You promise this would get rid of him?" That was Hermione.

"It would, yes," Riddle said, and inclined his head to her as if he found her worthy of such graciousness. Harry could see the expression on Draco's face when Riddle did that, and had to restrain a snicker. Riddle straightened back up and smiled gently around on all of them, as though he didn't need their blessing but he'd like it. "If I am allowed to perform it the way I want to, at the _site _I want to, without your interference."

Andromeda stirred again. "You didn't say—with our help."

"That is because I would not need it," Riddle said, and Harry shivered a little at the way his voice echoed, or didn't echo. It was becoming hard to tell anymore. "I would only need the help of one person, and I am not sure that he considers himself part of the Light Resistance right now." He turned towards the door. "Do you, Harry?"

Harry started. At least from the way Draco leaped to his feet and Ron drew his wand, they hadn't known he was there, either.

But that Riddle knew…

Harry shook off the part of himself that felt absurdly sorry for the other Harry, the Dark one, and then stepped slowly out into the open. At least his door didn't creak threateningly as he opened it, the absurd way he'd imagined it doing.

"I'll only help if you tell me everything," he said, meeting Riddle's eyes. "And if you tell me why you think this Dark Lord of yours is going to be attracted to me."

Riddle chuckled. The sound had a trill in it, but a moment later Harry figured out that was Firebrand, who flew off the perch from behind him and circled Riddle's chair twice before he landed on the back of it. Riddle absently moved his head for the phoenix to have room to grip, and then reached up and slid his fingers back and forth through the feathers on Firebrand's breast.

Harry remembered that phoenixes were pure creatures, and that one of them wouldn't choose a wizard who was as evil as Riddle sometimes sounded. But then he had to look at Firebrand, utterly content with being caressed by someone who had described himself as a power-seeker, and wonder if the phoenixes knew that.

"Not attracted to you," Riddle said. "But drawn. Against his will. Did you not notice that he went after you himself, when he has people for that?"

"No," Harry said. "I don't know all the history of your world, and I was _trying to survive having my soul eaten._"

Riddle moved a hand, ignoring the gasps of some of the Light Resistance. "The Patronus could not have eaten your soul in the same way a Dementor could have."

"And that makes it _all _better."

A sudden movement caught Harry's eye, and he turned his head to see Neville starting to his feet. But Hermione had clasped her hand over her mouth, and her eyes sparkled.

"I see what you mean about being able to trust him," Draco drawled. He hadn't risen from his chair again, and he was watching Harry with his eyes narrowed with contempt. "He blurts everything out the instant it enters his head."

"Yeah, like the way I know what you look like when you cry over Voldemort assigning you an impossible task," Harry sniped back.

Riddle stirred. Harry thought that was the only reason Draco didn't draw his wand, although he _did _shoot out of his chair. He sat back down a second later, but he was breathing hoarsely, and his eyes were fastened on Harry's face as if they would never leave.

"You have no idea what you're talking about," Draco whispered.

"Yeah, I do," Harry said. He was wishing that he hadn't said the name "Voldemort," with the way Riddle was looking at him, but he had, and it was no use hoping that he could go back now. "Voldemort was the Dark Lord in my world, and you were one of his Death Eaters. He wanted you to kill Dumbledore. I found you crying in one of the bathrooms, because he'd threatened your family if you didn't do it. You tried to attack me with an Unforgivable, but I attacked you instead."

Draco was watching him with no expression on his face. "So," he asked after a moment, "who won?"

"I did," Harry said. "Of course." He decided not to mention the part about how he hadn't _meant _to leave Malfoy bleeding on the floor, although from the faint twist around Riddle's mouth, he suspected Harry had left something out.

Draco turned to Riddle. "Use him in whatever way you want," he said. "Make the plans. I'll follow them. I didn't come to join the Light Resistance only to balk when you wanted me to do something."

"But?" Riddle touched the tips of his fingers together, and Firebrand leaned down as if he wanted to put his plumes between them.

"I don't want to speak to him," Draco said, and stood up and walked towards the door, not looking over his shoulder. Harry had to admit that was more control than the Malfoy from his world would have had.

"If he's managed to alienate Draco, then why should we have him with us?" That was Ron, his voice harsh as he glanced at Harry and then away again. Maybe he couldn't stand to look at Harry's face, Harry thought. That was—possible, and he had to remember that, no matter how much he hurt. "I don't want to work with him, either."

"How fortunate that you will not have to," Riddle said. "Since I will be the one to construct the plans with him. Go now."

Hermione took Ron's arm and herded him out of there. Neville left in a hurry, his eyes on the floor, only darting up to Harry's face once. Andromeda did stop to look between Harry and Riddle as if she suspected Riddle would try something damaging, then sniffed and turned to Harry.

"You still look cold," she said. "We don't know as much as Lord Riddle thinks we do about the effects of exposure to reverse Patronuses. Make sure that you stay warm over the next few days."

"I think I can speak for making sure of _that_," Riddle said, and his voice was dark with laughter.

Andromeda met his eyes. "It's wrong, Sunlord," she said. "Even _you _may not be able to control that much magic."

"I think I am," said Riddle.

Even Harry could feel the wall those words put between Andromeda and Riddle. Sighing, Andromeda turned her back and walked out of the room. She _did _pause to look back, once, at the door, but Riddle might as well not have been there. She was looking at Harry, and her gaze was huge and clear and complicated.

"I wish you luck," she said, and then closed the door softly behind her.

Harry turned around to stare at Riddle. Riddle was lounging back on the chair again, his expression gone bored and still and his fingers toying with Firebrand's plumes. When he saw Harry looking at him, though, he sat up.

"I am not pleased with you revealing the name of Voldemort to Black and the rest," he announced.

"Don't say anything about it, and no one will connect you with it," Harry pointed out. "In the meantime, I want to know exactly what you're going to do. And why you think I can help with it. And why you're so powerful over all the rest of them that they'll go along with you plans, even when they don't trust me."

Riddle half-smiled. "Very well. I'll take you to the site of the place that I plan to defeat the Dark Lord." He held out his hand. "We need to Apparate."

"We _can, _from inside the school?" Harry came cautiously closer, not really reassured when Firebrand rose off the back of the chair, crooned, and flew around him. He already had reason to question Firebrand's taste in masters.

"I can transform the wards temporarily to ones that allow Apparition, and then seal them again behind us," Riddle said, as if it wasn't that big a deal. "In the meantime, are you coming or not?" He snapped his fingers impatiently at Harry.

Harry snarled at him and took his arm.

The world seemed to waver around them. Harry gasped. He found it hard to be sure, but he thought he spent a longer time in Apparition than he ever had before. Of course, maybe Riddle was just doing that to fuck with him.

The world wavered around them again as they landed. Harry fell to his knees for a second, then forced himself back to his feet without looking Riddle in the eye. No chance to give the bastard more time to smirk.

He was on a flat black stone street, with crumbled stone buildings all around him. The street stretched on and on until it ran into a wall, which looked like the humped back of a serpent as it traveled up and down. Harry glanced up behind the wall, and saw mountains.

He frowned. They were blue with distance, but close enough—and Riddle was looking at him expectantly enough—that Harry thought they were what Riddle had brought him to see. He even thought he should recognize one of them, which humped like the wall and seemed to have two different peaks.

"Do you know where we are?"

Harry straightened his spine, and said, "No." He thought of adding that Riddle couldn't really expect him to recognize some _Mugglr _place. But he decided the single word would serve well enough.

Riddle nodded, and turned to pace down the street, studying the ruined buildings almost affectionately. "This is the solution to a problem I have been considering for some time," he said over his shoulder. "If it were a matter of sheer power, I could destroy our twisted Mr. Potter. I am stronger than he is, and he does not understand Light magic well enough for him to use it against me.

"But two things prevent this. First, he is never alone, and his followers could keep me busy enough to allow him to overwhelm me.

"Second, he may have made some preparation to ensure his survival after death." He glanced keenly at Harry. "Such as a Horcrux."

Harry had to look doubtfully at the crumbled buildings around them. "And you think this place can help you overcome that?"

Riddle didn't answer. Harry turned to look at him and took a step back.

Riddle's smile was full of a dark, endless joy.

"I have you to lure him now," Riddle said simply. "If he thinks you could provide a weapon against him, perhaps by telling us how he thinks, he would have to come."

"But I'm from a different world..."

"What matters is what he believes, not what is true."

Harry nodded uneasily.

Riddle tilted his head back to the sun, and closed his eyes. "This place is a site of power," he whispered. "One strong enough to enable me to burn his soul out forever, with the right combination of magic." He glanced curiously at Harry. "And you truly do not recognize it?"

Harry shook his head. His breath was hard to come by as he watched Riddle.

"The greatest of its kind left in Europe," Riddle said, and his smile widened over his face until there was nothing but that savage light. "Mount Vesuvius. For volcanoes are also servants of the Light."


End file.
